Trend Days
by Chart School - July 19th, 2009 7:44 pm
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Trend Days
I want to explain the concept of trend days, v churn days that I’ve been mentioning of late. I’ve noticed these patterns over the past few quarters, but have only in the past 4 weeks or so tried to take advantage of it. So far, with good success. What has really stood out aside from the fact what happens yesterday has nothing to do with today (the market has no memory) is how few reversal days we have anymore. I am not sure the cause of this; I am sure part of it is the dominance of program trading over humans with momentum based strategies but who knows how much. All I know is it has continued repeatedly and while obvious to me (and I assume others) it keeps repeating. So until the pattern ends, there is no reason not to take advantage of it – there are actually some low risk strategies that keep your cash protected overnight but allow you to allocate capital via the levered ETFs (long or short) or even calls or puts (which I’ve started doing); and you can be done by the end of the day and have that money cozy under your mattress.
By a reversal day I just mean a very choppy day where we start the day up by a significant margin and then go down significantly later in the day, or vice versa. Those happen occassionally but seemingly far less than in the past. Instead, we have had a dominance of 2 kind of days: (a) churn days or (b) trend days. Most of the time you know by 10:30 – 11:00 AM what it is going to be.The churn days have also been remarkable of late – we had a few examples last week during the downturn… immediately after a huge swoon the very next day (remember, the market has no memory from day to day) we get an almost silent day. The market will essentially ping pong back and forth in a very small range, from top to bottom of the range but never making a new high or a new low. Shape wise it…