If you’ve focused entirely on the US Dollar Index, you may have missed the fact that – in general – for the Dollar Index to rise, foreign currencies must fall – and in some cases, that fall has been dramatic. Let’s look at a few currency indexes (FOREX) to see the flip side of a…
What we may have missed recently is the weakness in technology related companies over the last week which was particularly punishing for most tech companies that started roughly at the same time DELL missed earnings and gapped lower. Let’s look at the XLK Technology SPDR and Google for some insights. XLK Technology Sector SPDR Daily:…
With Monday’s trading activity behind us, let’s look at what happened and see if the markets were smiling at us from their charts. First, the Dow Jones (DIA) 5-minute chart: I embellished the chart a bit by drawing two connecting curved trendlines to look like a smiling face (we all need a little levity at…
If you don’t trade airline shares today, you may have missed this interesting intraday development that occurred around lunch time. The Chicago Sun Times reports the story “United Airlines Shares Plunge on False Bankruptcy Report.” Apparently, the Florida Sun Sentinel website posted an article dated 6 years ago and simply (erroneously) changed the date to…
With virtually all news focused on Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) and their government take-over, let’s look at their charts while they still exist to learn any trading lessons from these companies. Freddie Mac (FRE) Daily: The take-away from this chart is that it’s generally unwise to bet against a prevailing or primary…
Wow – August was another month with a high percentage of overnight gaps, but let’s see how many of these overnight gaps in the DIA (Dow Jones) were filled intraday. I define a gap as being an open that is at least $0.20 different than yesterday’s close and use Excel for the statistics. There were…
Wow, what a day Friday gave us in the markets. Let’s look inside the price action to see what potentially profitable trade set-ups occurred in the intraday structure of the major stock market indexes. DIA Dow Jones 5-minute chart: Price began the day with an opening gap down, given the bearish ‘trend day’ from Thursday,…
Technicians should not be surprised with the recent downward price ejection out of the August consolidation pattern, known as a ‘rising wedge.’ Not only did the pattern follow classic definitions and expectations, we were treated with a prior example of the pattern just a few short months ago. Let’s look at the Dow Jones index…
Today’s 3% index rout reaffirmed the predominant and primary downtrend on the major US Equity Indexes, and also confirmed the breakdown of consolidation from a bearish rising wedge as the dominant technical pattern. Let’s look at the S&P 500 weekly chart to see the structure. S&P 500 Weekly: Price peaked in October, 2007 and a…
A reader asked me yesterday to look at a potential ascending triangle on the 3-year chart of copper and indeed that is the dominant structure of Copper prices and it’s definitely worth a second look. Let’s take a look at the compressed weekly chart of Copper prices (Symbol $COPPER in StockCharts.com): Ascending triangles are consolidation…