Swing Short Setup on QQQQ
I’ve got electric light
And I’ve got second sight
Got amazing powers of observationAnd that is how I know
When I try to get through
On the telepone to you
There’ll be nobody home(Pink, at his sardonic best, to his cheating wife - From Roger Waters’ brilliant writing on THE WALL)
Ah, yes. The closest rock music ever came to being literature. And the engineering! Whose idea was it to have Gomer Pyle on the TV in the background saying “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” precisely at the most despondent, bitter pause in the passage? Probably Waters as well.
Oh, stocks… What about ‘em? 
I know it takes the visual acuity of Helen Keller to see the topping action in the market, but it’s scary as hell to say it out loud, lest that beeyotch goes up another 500 points. That’s ok, I ain’t skeered. Here goes:
The VIX is about as low as it’s ever been:
The Qs showed a big volume day on 11/8/06 which looked like topping action. But since then the price has run another couple of dollars. HOWEVER, note that the volume has been diminishing the entire time. Is this the little guys exhausting themselves?
And here’s a closer look at that Hanging Man:
What to do? I can only speak for me (and don’t do that very well), but I’m looking to Get Smart Short on a break of the Hanging Man’s low with a stop at Friday’s high. If this trade triggers, I’ll be looking for a minimum of a couple days’ pullback, with the potential for an actual downward thrust.
If the market roars onward and upward, well, next time, then.
john w said,
November 27, 2006 @ 8:16 am
Maybe - but be very careful with last weeks holiday volume - look back a couple of years and you will see it is always the same pattern - and there is always a huge volume spike right in front of it.
Keep your stop tight.
john said,
November 27, 2006 @ 5:56 pm
great interview with stocktickr…btw, what is The BooK: the Taboo against knowing yourself about…i have an idea, but i was curious if you could give some detail
Will said,
November 27, 2006 @ 9:47 pm
Hi John - The Book is the first work I’d direct anyone to who’d come to the place in their life where they’d begun to ask the “Big Questions.” Watts was the greatest conduit between Eastern thought and Western thought who ever lived. A veritable walking, talking, Unified Field Theorem of philosophy and religion. He was a genius at capturing ten-dollar concepts with 50-cent words, which is lucky for me.
In The Book, he very eloquently explains how The Truth (for lack of a better term) cannot be named or described directly (else it wouldn’t be The Truth, no?), it’s something that is experienced personally, and differently, for each person. He goes on to explain how the great prophets and teachers have used myth and parables in order to point to It (see the works of Lao Tse, JC, Siddharta, etc). Unfortunately, as Watts puts it, we usually end up looking at the finger that’s pointing and never see the moon it’s trying to point us to.
And as with the finger, over time we humans largely find ourselves worshipping the teachers and ignoring the teaching, and we have all these splintered religions and denominations of religions and dogmas and untold killing and destruction as a result, the diametric opposite of what those teachers would have wanted.
According to Watts, the drive to “get somewhere,” to “succeed” (financially, materialistically), the need to BE RIGHT (usually by making others wrong), the ego-driven false philanthropy (whose proponents I believe Thoreau said “do more to create the suffering by their manner of living than the good they purport to do relieves”, or something like that)… they’re all the upshot of not knowing, or rather, not remembering, what we really are.
And he fills the book with myths, stories, parables and jokes to try and help point towards that. For me, in this and Watts’ other works, in addition to quite a few books by other authors, there’s a subtle “something” which rings so true, which reminds me that if I play along with the rat race, I do it by choice, and that it’s just perfect to be as simple as I am, and when I remember that, it makes all the difference in my trading and my life.
Will said,
November 27, 2006 @ 11:26 pm
john w - thanks for the info, and trust me, “my stops are so tight I’m singing falsetto”!
john said,
November 28, 2006 @ 6:04 pm
thanks will