Volume: The Stock Market’s “Footprints”
by ilene - April 14th, 2010 2:03 pm
Volume: The Stock Market’s "Footprints"
Market volume changes can signal a trend change
Courtesy of Elliott Wave International
A few years ago, a question was posed to Elliott Wave International’s president Robert Prechter:
"Under the Wave Principle, what is the most important thing to watch other than price?"
Prechter answered via his monthly Elliott Wave Theorist: "Volume."
High trading volume is a chief characteristic of a healthy trend, bullish or bearish. The DJIA has rallied for over a year now off its March 2009 low, but volume has consistently been lacking. We’ve shared our thoughts on this fact many times with our subscribers.
"Many market watchers said that the low volume in December was merely seasonal and not bearish. But volume in January has been no higher than it was from December 1 to December 22, and it is still lower than October’s, which was lower than September’s, and so on."
-- Bob Prechter, Elliott Wave Theorist, January 2010.
Even lately, low volume has persisted. Here’s what is notable, though: The market’s down days have generally been on higher volume than the up days. This could mean investors are gradually leaving the market. Our Monday-Wednesday-Friday Short Term Update has been monitoring volume closely:
March 31 Short Term Update: "Today was the first down close since March 24 and it occurred on increased volume."
April 5: "A contraction in the number of NYSE issues closing up versus down over the past two weeks as well as the total daily NYSE volume that was up versus down shows [that] internally, the market was ‘correcting’."
April 6: "The S&P closed up, but breadth was noticeably weaker today versus yesterday, as was the NYSE up/down volume ratio."
On Monday, April 12, the Dow climbed over 30 points intraday before closing with a modest gain of just under 9 points and actually falling into negative territory for a time. While this did mark the first time the Dow closed above 11,000 in many moons, volume remained near the muted levels of April 9. Here’s the April 12 Short Term Update’s comment (online now):
"NYSE volume remains anemic, with just 964 million shares traded today (4/13). April has now consisted of 7 trading sessions of which 5 occurred with NYSE volume of less than 1 billion shares traded, which is a bit ‘zany’ in that the first two weeks of
Citi Is 47% Of All NYSE Volume
by ilene - December 17th, 2009 5:01 pm
Citi Is 47% Of All NYSE Volume
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Thank god for that secondary, or else there would be no volume in the market today. No, seriously. Courtesy of the biggest and most botched secondary offering in history (you are welcome overpaid Citi bonus recipients), and thanks to Goldman et al buying up every share that has a $3.1x handle (we’ll see how long that continues: after all someone has been loading up on Citi CDS to the gills) Citi accounts for 47% of all NYSE volume. Add the other fins, and the HFT are running straight out of luck. Watch for the cannibalization among the high frequency scalpers to start in earnest very soon.
Here is the ratio of C to total NYSE volume:
The Coming Blowback of Banking Fraud
by ilene - September 11th, 2009 12:16 am
Here’s an enlightening article by J.S. Kim on the Central Banks’ success in fooling the world into believing in green shoots and money falling out of the sky, and the inevitable day of reckoning.
The Coming Blowback of Banking Fraud
Courtesy of J.S. Kim of SmartKnowledgeU™
The Double Dip Recession, or the “W” shaped recovery that a minority of economists, such as Joseph Stiglitz, is now stating as a strong possible outcome of this current rally, should not be discussed in the realm of economics but rather in the more apropos realm of financial fraud. The fact that the upleg of the “W” shaped recovery that is occurring now will inevitably crumble in spectacular fashion will not be a result of any free market principle, but rather the direct consequence of a fraudulent scheme executed by an elite global financial oligarchy, otherwise known as Central Banks. If the mission of this current manufactured leg-up in Western stock markets was to fool the world into believing that global economies are recovering, then clearly, up until this point, the mission has been a resounding success.
For those unfamiliar with the term “blowback”, it’s a CIA term that was first used in March 1954 to describe the unintended consequences of US government international activities kept secret from the American people.
Though this term has primarily been used to describe the consequences of covert military operations, “blowback” is an appropriate term to use to describe the coming consequences of banking fraud because the US government, US Federal Reserve, Wall Street, the US Treasury, and the Exchange Stabilization Fund have all engaged in domestic and international financial and monetary transactions that have been kept secret from the world, and that will have severe and negative consequences in the not so distant future. In fact, I predict that the blowback of these activities will not only exceed, but far exceed, the fallout the world experienced in 2008 at the prior apex of this current crisis. Most people today can not even fathom how bad the situation will become primarily because of all the secrecy that the banksters have engaged in – in US Treasury markets, the gold markets, the US dollar markets, agriculture commodities, stock markets, and financial markets – in hiding reality from the people.
In an article I wrote three months ago, on June 10, 2009, titled, “…