I just noticed that this post marks the 2,000th blog post on the Afraid to Trade blog! I wanted to announce this milestone and take a moment to thank all the readers who continue to motivate me to keep writing, researching, and posting. As any fellow financial blogger will tell you, it’s not easy to…
Just when it seemed like this market would continue its journey to the moon, we had a major one-day (at least) snap-back in price that erased the gains of the last week, plunging us in one day to an intraday low price not seen since last Thursday, April 8th.
For those of you who follow key market internals on an intraday basis, you almost certainly noticed that today’s break to new recovery highs in the S&P 500 was not confirmed (really in any way) by any of the three key market internals. That’s a warning signal but not yet a ‘reversal’ signal unless we see follow-through with lower prices.
Let’s take a quick look at the internals and intraday chart as we wind down into the close on April 15th.
I often advocate taking at least a few moments to pull everything off your chart except price – doing so allows you to see the character or structure of a market without all the clutter.
This post is an update on my prior post “S&P 500 Trendlines Reveal Boundaries and Positive Feedback Loop” which still rings true today.
Since the February 2010 bottom, two trendlines have been the only thing that ‘mattered’ when setting up trading decisions – not volume or momentum divergences, not overbought oscillators, nor any other methodology.
The folks at EWI (Elliott Wave International) released a provoking new article today entitled: “Blaming Market Manipulation for Losses is a Huge Obstacle to Success.” The article encourages traders to take responsibility for losses instead of finding scape-goats to blame. Losses may have just been the result of a bad outcome from a high-probability trade……
The prior “Arc Update” posts have generated a lot of attention, and I wanted to continue that series with updated charts that answers a question that a few readers have asked:
“What would the arcs look like on Logarithmic Charts?” instead of the default arithmetic charts I’m showing.
Reference back to the prior updates for comparison, especially:
In one of those strange occurrences that feels like you’re in the Twilight Zone, all four major US Equity Indexes are bumping into “Round Number” levels all at the same time. That’s generally an unusual occurrence.
So, it pays to take a quick look at all four indexes as they challenge these overhead levels – for better or worse!
Tim Bourquin at TraderInterviews.com posted a new featured interview with a full-time swing trader who shares his strategies for stock selection, holding period/strategy, and exit plans. Interestingly enough, he referred to himself as a “Cocktail Napkin Technician” which means that he keeps his methods as simple as possible – so much so, that it wouldn’t…
In following up from this afternoon’s post, I wanted to show a grid of the main nine AMEX Sector SPDR ETFs distance from the 2007 (or 2008) high, as a gauge of the recovery (and distance to new highs as of April 6, 2010).
Today was the successful resolution of a short-term pattern that formed in the SPY intraday timeframe, giving us a great example of a symmetrical price triangle breakout, move back to test the apex (breakout zone), and the profitable move that resulted.