Market readies for next thrust
First, let’s just count the rules I broke today… nah, no need. Knowing that a certain day’s your one chance this week to get some trades in can make you too earger, like going hunting and saying, “By God, I’m gonna shoot at something!”
The range-bound sideways movement made for a perfect day to get some chores done, or maybe invite a friend to call in sick and come over for “coffee” (and she knows who she is). Instead I made 7 trades, trying to switch from short to long with the indecisive market, and got stopped out of 6 of them, 4 for losses. Ah, time to get out the notebook and re-read some old passages.
One benefit of today’s “tuition”: I noticed some very interesting patterns of market-makers hitting ask- ask- ask- ask- with small lots to run the price up a bit, then flipping and feeding a buttload of falling stock to the unsuspecting. 50 cents lower, and they’d do the exact opposite on the same stock. On one stock, I had a stop-limit short order well below the last 30-60 minutes’ action. Midday when the volume got really thin, some SOB walked the price down over 50 cents in about 15 seconds, bought the chunk of shares from me, then let it walk right back up, like a vulture picking up a piece of dead meat. Most folks, including me, have rules about not entering new trades after around 1200 EST, and this kind of game is one of the reasons. But, today found me doing my Judas Priest imitation (”Breakin’ the Law, Breakin’ the Law”).
To the charts! The Market Today showed a gap-down opening, then buying, then sideways the rest of the day:
The candle this action drew popped up as a Thrusting Bearish pattern:
However (and there always seems to be a damned however, eh?), this candle is not a major bearish signal by itself. It could easily mark a near-term bottom. How to know? Well, as always, don’t anticipate. Wait for the break, grasshoppa, wait for the break.
I have a swing short on the Qs I entered off its hanging-man last week. A break of today’s bar to the upside will see me covering. A break to the downside, and I may add more.
The S&P put in an almost identical performance:
So… tomorrow should provide some interesting trading. Yesterday definitely did. Alas, I was off work today. Dammit.