falling knives.. no reason to play hero.. http://www.trade2win.com/boards/showthread.php?p=368739&posted=1#post368739
this is looking like a flat out collapse & about time. 1000 dow points would be the equivilent of 100 S&P/ES points....from closing price of 1483.....less 100 handles would be the 1385 August 16th lo.......seems almost impossible.....but they said the same thing on Oct 19th 1987. i would`nt be surprised & i actually expect it!
Post I made one week ago (11/1/07): In early AH trading, we've touched 1466.75, which is close enough. Regardless of whether we go up or down from here in AH, I would expect that we'll revisit this level in Thursday's RTH. What happens next will tell the tale. If B1S2 hung onto his full-position short, he's up 45 points in one day. Now that's truly heroic. He has my permission to take the weekend off.
I wrote a similar post at around the same time, and measured moves have been around since at least the time of Elliott, so I imagine a couple of thousand of others have the same idea in mind. The real question is this: Are you planning on making any purchases if this level is retouched? What about shorts? As for me, I am in no rush to buy, as bottoms are generally put in over time, and there will be plenty of chances. but I will be putting some money to work at the mid 60's and around the mid-40's. My IRA is only 25% invested, and my trading account is 100% in cash, so the powder is there.
Yeah, my retirement account is more than 50% in cash and the rest in investments that are fully hedged against general stock market risk or in non-US markets. As mentioned here many times before, I'm expecting the start of a multi-year secular bear market sometime in 2008, but I'm not smart enough to know exactly when -- or indeed whether it's already begun. Great opportunities ahead for traders who play the downside, but bad times ahead for the U.S. I'm afraid.
No one is smart enough to know. I spent eight years in graduate school studying such things, and I know enough to know that no one knows. Not even Jim Rogers. I saw that you were trading the ultra short etf in your IRA. Do you know that some brokerages will allow trading ES and other futures in the IRA?
I figure Jim will know before I do. Yes, but not Charles Schwab. I've considered opening a futures trading IRA account with another broker, but haven't done so yet. For the moment, my trading in my IRA account is confined to ETFs and options.
He made an awesome call, but his gains are not "heroic", about 3% on margin so far. If he was to use a $1k margin or account size near $100k-500K, then it would have been a different matter.