Yes, the script has been flipped...it just has that feel that the big funds have to get back to even and some sort of "agreement" can be reached to just gun this thing back up to at least stem downside momentum (which was gone anyways by last week)..."most shorted" stocks outpaced everything on Friday and the "glam stocks" are still perched near their all-time highs...gotta love the neo-feudal economy...
Yeahim not very good at index trading, most of the times i just trade it at extremes, though i did make pretty good money buying the SPXS every time the sandp hit the top in the last 6 months. But even with those i would only hold for a couple days of rollover, hard to say if i made more, or less that way then if i had just taken 1 position and held for the entire move. I mostly just trade the ES as something to subsidize those days where there is absolutely nothing to trade, one trade i was looking at was december 2100 calls, or spy 210 calls (cant remember which one) but they were trading for a buck, its a good way to make sure you hold the trade till years end. Im still not 100% convinced the bottom is in, but odds would seem to dictate we rally here until christmas, especially since the dollar seems to be peaking. September really was the moment of truth for anyone who thought the fed might actually raise rates, and the fed folded like a cheap suit..... no increase coming till next year guaranteed, and if it comes next year it will probably be late next year, they arent going to want to do it before an election. /QUOTE]
Yeah, cheap calls/puts is a nice way to trade this stuff...or even just some simple vertical spreads if you can manage to leg into them well would work...takes away some of the ugliness of the intra-day whipsaw (granted it can be great if you can read the moves)... I think that you are right about the Fed...they postpone it (I never thought they were serious about raising to begin with), but now everyone else will start to see that raising rates wont happen anytime soon and the bullish pundits will start getting louder again and all of a sudden we'll churn our way back up higher...Maybe it will be another one of those correction type moves (pre-FOMC in mid-Sept)...enough chop to trap bears and bulls the whole way up...the last week I was seeing the same trap and harvest for both sides on the way down and the volatility indicies were collapsing... the 2011 correction bottomed in the first few days of Oct...and there is probably going to be someone out there who will scream loud enough that this was the same thing and the whole "bull market is intact" chorus will grow louder...it's funny how we can always be a razor's edge away from a serious collapse but it just takes one day of "buy em ugly" bidding to change the entire conversation...seen this movie too many times...
At the risk of getting all chartist and looking too far out, I could see this happening: Purely based on the fact that I see these DT/DB patterns on a fairly common basis. I actually was going off the assumption that we'd atleast hit that 38.2% fib before figuring out what would happen next and combined with a bunch of other stuff (a lot of Asia/Euro buying, sentiment, etc) is what helped form a long bias this past week. We haven't hit that fib yet and it's entirely possible that could be a reversal area as well - but I usually see those scallopy/CNH/ICH-type patterns play out when the last drive down is lower (or higher if this were flipped) than the most significant previous one (meaning in this case below 1860-1850 area) and that didn't happen. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out given the many news landmines and other headfuckery presenting themselves on a daily/weekly basis these days. Completely unrelated trivia: The reason Sur13 (Surenõs) and MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) include 13 in their names is because it's an alphabetical reference to La Eme ("the M") aka the Mexican Mafia.
Discussed US economy with a friend investment banker, in his opinion the economy in US is doing "really well, amazingly well".