Hello,I'm french and I trade french cac40 future. To progress,I see others futures and since a month,I see the e-mini s&p500. I see the breakout of the higher and the lovver of the first half hour (09h30-10h00 NY time,08h30-09h00 Chicago Time,15h30-16h00 at home in France). VVith a target profit and a good stop loss,I think that this "method" can have good results. Do you have opinions on that ? Thanks.
This phenomenom has been exaggerated pretty recently due to what appears to be the beginning of a new bull cycle. The opening morning has the greatest volatility though followed by the closing hour. Many times it ranges between the area established in the morning rather than the breakout extremes that we've been seeing lately.
JT, Based on your posts in another thread I would venture to guess your outlook is as follows, please correct me where I err. In order for a 'new bull,' there needs to exist a generally negative sentiment towards the possibility of a new bull. The fact that current sentiment is at best mixed - if not generally positive - is an indication that many of those who would 'buy-in' have already done so and as a result the move upward stands a worse chance of continuing than it would if general sentiment was negative. It seems that, based on this argument, the highest probability outlook on the market is one that depicts atleast a minor near-term correction before a significant continuation of the most recent bull trend. Such a correction could create an environment whereby the buyers could once again significantly outnumber the sellers and the bull trend could continue. Do you have any parameters or gauges by which to measure the occurence of this phenomenon? If so, and I believe you began stating this in another thread, how do you apply these parameters/gauges?
Empirically I think it is hard to gauge the effectiveness of sentiment by polling newsletters. Other, more effective gauges, would be to keep an eye on the true money flow movement like the COT and the mutual fund net flow. One would had have to identify if the money supply is tapped out or there continues to be some on the sideline. This is by no means a timing mechanism so much as identifying the overall trend as opposed to the intermediate or short-term. But then again, contrarian investor sentiment fails to succeed at this point as well. I believe on the ICI website, 03 YTD net new cash of mutual funds was 4468M as opposed to 02 YTD of 66,600M. Now, there's nothing to say that those monies won't be funneled into other markets, say bonds, but it certainly indicates to me that mom&pop investor pulled money out during the general market decline and is now sitting rather worthless, due to non-existent interest rates, in the bank. But then you have other sentiment/money flow readings like the increadibly high insider selling ratio and so forth. The sentiment reading tends to differ with other groups; I keep an eye on multiple newsletters, chats, and boards and they all appear, subjectively at least, bearish. All the way from 800 to 1000, at some time just like a broken clock, they will be right twice a day. Sentiment is just an unscientific, unrepresentative opinion poll.