Thrilling Thursday – Will Jackson Hole Give us S&P 2,000?
by phil - August 21st, 2014 6:01 am
I could take today off.
Why? Because I already wrote this article last month, on a Thursday, when the S&P was at 1,988 and topped out at 1,991, which was $199.06 on SPY and, as you can see from Dave Fry's chart, SPY topped out at $199.16 yesterday (before plunging back to $198.90 on strong volume into the close).
Will this time be different? I certainly hope so because last time, we plunged about 5%, back to 1,904 over the next 10 sessions and it's taken us another 10 to claw our way back for another attempt at an all-time high.
In our Live Member Chat this morning, we shorted the run-up in the Futures at Dow 16,990 (/YM), S&P 1,985 (/ES), Nasdaq 4,045 (/NQ) and Russell 1,155 (/TF) because, as I said to our Members:
I'm sorry but I simply can't reconcile this news with what's going on in the markets so I'm going to continue to lose money hedging to make sure we keep what we have. The alternative is going to cash but there is simply no way I can endorse getting more bullish on this market at this point.
One major difference this time is we DON'T have money flowing out of SPY (as much), as we did last month and we DO have the Fed's Jackson Hole conference tomorrow, which looks to Global Investors like a Santa Claus convention with Yellen, Draghi, Carney and Kuroda sitting under the spruce trees with gigantic bags of FREE MONEY – and that's why traders are as giddy as kids before Christmas this week.
But, Virginia, is there really a Santa Claus, or are the bulls hopes and dreams about to be crushed by cruel economic realities they have, so far, been avoiding like the plague (or Ebola)? Realities like China's horrific PMI this morning, that dropped from 51.7 to 50.3 (barely positive) and France's PMI, which is back in heavy contraction at 46.5 this morning. Retail Sales…
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Faltering Thursday – Trouble at the Top?
by phil - May 15th, 2014 8:42 am
Now what?
Options expire on Friday and last expiration day (4/18), we were 2.5% higher on the Russell and Nasdaq , which is about how much higher the Dow, S&P and NYSE are from where they were at the time.
It's been an interesting month watching our indexes diverge but, as we discussed in our Tug Boat Example last week, this sort of behavoir simply doesn't last very long. The end of that discussion (last Thursday) was:
NYSE 10,000 was clearly the right line and 10,500 is the 5% line and 10,750 is 7.5% with the NYSE now at 10,667. Another reason we don't move the Must Hold lines is the NYSE has given no indication at all that it will be able to go over 11,000 (10% line) and we're back the tugboat that holds the others back.
RUT 1,100 is the 10% line and 1,200 is the 20% line and the RUT moves like the only thing trading it is a computer running on the 5% Rule. Complete obedience of the lines makes it fantastic to trade – except the direction it moves is quick and seemingly random! Still, 1,100 is a very good floor (so bullish above) and 1,200 has been too hard to hold (so short below) and, at the moment, it's fallen into the lowest quadrant of that range – not able to stay over 1,125. That indicates a downward bias as it makes a triangle squeezy thingy down there (and it's below the 200 dma at 1,115 at the moment).
So, either the RUT comes out of the triangle squeezy thingy to the downside and drags the others with it or the Dow, NYSE and S&P pop over their resistance and bring the RUT along for the ride. Interesting times indeed…
As you can see from Dave Fry's Russell Chart, the RUT resolved it's triangle sqeezy thingy to the downside – after the requisite head-fake and now we're back to the…
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TGIF – Can We Stop The Week Before Our Indexes Fail?
by phil - May 9th, 2014 8:29 am
Look at the Russell!
Look at the Nasdaq! Are you seriously still holding onto your Dow, S&P and NYSE stocks? That's exactly what people did in 2008, when they were so used to the markets being saved whenever they dipped, that they ignored all the warning signs – until it was too late.
I know that I've been sounding like a broken record and you can call me Chicken Little but cut me a little slack as we are protecting profits here.
We have 5 virtual porfolios we track for our Members and the $100,000 Butterfly Portfolio is up 19.4% ($19,000), the $500,000 Long-Term Portfolio is up 9.6% ($48,000), the $100,000 Portfolio is down 5.8% ($5,800), the $500,000 Income Portfolio is up 6.4% ($32,000) and our $25,000 Portfolio is up 15.4% ($3,850). Overall, that's a gain of 8.8% on $1.225M deployed in 4 months.
The Short-Term Portfolio is a hedge to the Long-Term Portfolio, so we haven't cashed those in but the Income Portfolio doesn't have an external hedge, so we moved to cash on that one last month (BEFORE the Nas and Rut started crashing off decade highs) and the Butterfly Portfolio is self-hedging while the $25KP has just one position left.
Perhaps I'm wrong and the Nasdaq and the Russell will recover and the other indexes will all move up to new highs. Even if they do, our worst case is we miss a bit of a rally. If we're breaking out to new all-time highs from here – there will be plenty of money to be made. BUT – if I'm right and the market drops 5-10%, then our taking 110% off the table at the top means that when we buy stocks again at 90%, we are buying 120% of what we could have bought had we not wisely cashed out in the rally.
The REWARD for being cautious is owning 20% more shares if we're right, owning maybe 2.5% less shares if we're wrong or owning the same amount if the market stays flat. It doesn't take a degree in statistical analysis to see why I…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.