What a freaky market, about ready to go insane

I hear you. I missed the AM short and was behind all day -- shorting and then see it whip back up-- Long and it felt like breaking down under me. I also missed a cover sitting at ES 835.50 buy( low was 835.75 that swing )-- talking about "no cigar." Yep Lost some money today trying too hard. Should have stopped when I missed the short in the morning. Funny thing is all my trades would have made good money if I didn't stop myself out (they all hit their targets.) But that's not a game to play in this market. Absolutely have to cut losses in this market.


Tomorrow is another day. Opportunities will be there.

 

Aaron, if your systems are not giving you what they did pre-September, then write something that does.

 

i work for kershner trading. fund managers aren't traders. this is a traders environment. you have to be fast and ready to act. if you are having trouble with trading then keep working on ways to profit from this extremely profitable environment.

 

I wouldn't call the USPS, the magazine industry, Symantec, Motorola, or Electronic Arts "finance or auto". I have lots of friends who are either facing losing their jobs or are already not working and can't find anything. I have to imagine that this isn't just some anomaly in my area.

I'm actually pretty surprised at the number of layoff announcements and their size. The USPS one seems particular scary if it happens.

In all seriousness stock_trader, are you ever objective and consider that you could possibly be wrong sometimes? You sound more like the people on the Yahoo message boards that just say the same thing over and over.

I've been on the wrong side the past few days and I'll be the first to admit it. I'm not always right, far from it.

 

As a trader you must be prepared to adapt and adjust for the three scenarios:

Bull Market
Sideways Market
Bear Market

All three are traded differently and the bear is by far the most volatile of them all and imho the one that offers the most opportunities.

Truth is only the most skilled seasoned traders can trade all three profitably.

TV

 

LOL! Try trading 2000 to 5000 lots.

It is definitely insane, but I wish the intra-day ranges were more like a 1000 points a day.

 

However the most profitable traders dont trade exceptionally in all 3.They excel in one type.

 

where did you get that idea?

 

Someone has to live through several bull and bear cycles before getting the idea they are good. Many people can "buy on the dips" in raging bull market but when it turns to bear they lose it all.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/business/economy/31econ.html

Economy Shrinks With Consumers Leading the Way

By PETER S. GOODMAN
Published: October 30, 2008

Less than a week before Americans go to the polls to select a president, the government reported on Thursday that the economy contracted from July through September. In a stark indication of widening national distress, consumer spending dipped for the first time in 17 years.


Economists said the drop in economic activity — with the gross domestic product shrinking at a 0.3 percent annual rate — presages more bad news in the months ahead. The impacts of a now-global financial crisis are continuing to squeeze companies and impede investment, causing more layoffs and austerity, while prompting Congress to consider a fresh round of spending aimed at stimulating commerce.


A Newark job fair sponsored by Monster.com, the help-wanted Web site, was thronged on Thursday. Many expect unemployment to pass 8 percent by mid-2009.

“The economy has taken a turn for the worse, big time,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist for Decision Economics, a consulting and forecasting group. “Consumption literally caved in. It is a prelude to much worse news on the economy over the next couple of quarters. The fundamentals around the consumer are all negative, and there are no signs of any help anytime soon, from anywhere.”

With the economy the dominant issue in the presidential election, the latest batch of dismal data offered no comfort to the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who has been running behind the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, in polls.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama seized on the latest evidence of the backsliding economy to warn that Mr. McCain would deliver more of the same.

“Our falling G.D.P. is a direct result of eight years of the trickle-down, Wall Street-first, Main Street-last policies that have driven our economy into a ditch,” Mr. Obama said while campaigning in Florida. “If you want to know where Senator McCain will drive this economy, just look in the rearview mirror. Because, when it comes to our economic policies, John McCain has stood with President Bush every step of the way.”

Mr. McCain’s campaign asserted that Mr. Obama’s efforts to increase taxes on wealthy Americans would deepen economic troubles.


An Economic Omen

“Obama’s ideologically driven plans to redistribute income will impose higher taxes on families, small businesses and investors,” Mr. McCain’s chief economic adviser, Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin, said in a statement distributed to reporters.

Economic downturns have proved unkind to the incumbent party in elections. Many analysts argue that the recession of 1990 and 1991 cost President George H. W. Bush a chance at re-election in 1992. President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, lost his 1980 re-election bid to Ronald Reagan after a particularly nasty recession earlier that year. In 1960, in the midst of a recession, John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, defeated Richard M. Nixon, who had been vice president in the Eisenhower administration.

Not since 1900, when William McKinley, a Republican, won re-election, has the incumbent party retained the White House in the midst of a recession or within a few months after one.

In a statement Thursday morning, the White House acknowledged the weakening of the economy, while pinning the blame on a series of unusual events and arguing that the $700 billion bailout of the financial system would soon deliver relief.

“Today’s G.D.P. report is weak, but it is not unexpected,” said a White House spokeswoman, Dana M. Perino. “A number of things contributed to the slowing economy in the third quarter — record high energy prices, housing and credit concerns, two major hurricanes and a prolonged Boeing strike. The president is taking forceful actions to return the economy to growth and job creation by early next year.”

Whoever captures the White House seems certain to inherit a starkly challenging economic picture. The economy began slipping in the last three months of 2007, dipping at a 0.2 percent annual rate. Then it grew modestly for six months, aided by tax rebate checks, but has since succumbed anew to slowdown.

Consumer spending — which makes up more than 70 percent of American economic activity — dipped at a 3.1 percent annual rate between July and September, after growing at a 1.2 percent annual rate in the previous three months.

That was the largest three-month drop since the second quarter of 1980, a contraction that was in some sense artificial: the Carter administration, seeking to suffocate inflation, imposed limits on bank borrowing. Putting that episode aside, this year’s drop represents the sharpest decline in consumer spending since the end of 1974.

Economists saw in the data a testament to the degree to which many households are so strapped that the very culture of American consumption has been altered.

After years of pulling winnings from soaring stock markets, borrowing against the appreciating value of homes and leaning on abundant credit cards, Americans are finding those arteries of finance sharply constricted.

“The American consumer is finally hitting a wall that simply hasn’t been there for 17 years,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “What you see here is just a confluence of negative events closing every avenue that consumers have tapped over the years. There’s only a couple of ways that consumers can finance their spending. It’s labor income or nonlabor income, and both are on the mat.”

The economy has shed 760,000 jobs since the beginning of the year, with layoffs accelerating in recent months. Many companies have cut the hours of workers on the payroll, further diminishing paychecks.

Housing prices have continued to plunge, removing home loans as a channel for finance. Banks still reckoning with disastrous investments on real estate have cut credit even to people with relatively decent histories.

This month, consumer confidence, a broadly watched gauge of American sentiment in use since 1967, plunged to its lowest level on record, attesting to the new psychology of worry and scrimping that now holds sway.

Tucked into the data released Thursday was a worrying sign of a new, potentially pernicious phase of the downturn. Investment by businesses for things like machinery, trucks, computers and software slipped by 1 percent in the third quarter. If past downturns are a guide, that dip could swiftly accelerate, as companies recognize diminishing business opportunities and forgo purchases.

In the last recession, in 2001, this type of outlay, capital spending, slipped at a 14 percent annual rate in the worst quarter.

“When business decides it’s time to cut back, it happens quickly,” Mr. Sinai said. “They say: ‘We’re not hiring, so why do we have to buy equipment if we don’t have additional workers? Why do we have to replace equipment?’ ”

As orders dry up, layoffs accelerate, further diminishing spending power and further reducing business in a downward spiral.

This is the thinking behind forecasts that now broadly assume the unemployment rate could jump from the current 6.1 percent to beyond 8 percent by the middle of next year, a level last seen a quarter-century ago.

This is the image that has many analysts assuming that the next six months will bring more pronounced contraction, as the downturn deepens into the most painful recession since the early 1980s, and perhaps even the 1970s, when the oil shocks assailed the nation.

“We are now entering the harshest part of the recession,” Nigel Gault, chief United States economist for the research group, IHS Global Insight, declared in a note to clients.

One bright spot throughout the downturn has been American exports, which continued to advance in the third quarter, expanding at a 5.9 percent annual rate. But that was down sharply from the 12.3 percent clip seen from April to June.

Most economists think a continued slowdown in exports is inevitable as much of the globe follows the United States into disarray. The financial crisis born in the United States has spread to Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Many countries that have been major buyers of American-made goods are now suffering.

“How are you going to export into that world?” asked Barry P. Bosworth, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Another continued source of economic growth is government spending, which expanded at a 5.8 percent annual pace in the third quarter. Military spending surged at an 18.1 percent annual rate, and federal spending over all jumped at a 13.8 percent annual clip.

“There’s a message in that,” said Mr. Bernstein, the Economic Policy Institute economist, who has urged Congress to create another package of government spending measures to stimulate the economy. “The one part of the G.D.P. we can reliably count on in these times is government.”