I was going thru charts last night back from the latter part of last year and noticed many of the days had a range of 15 - 20 points.. What happened.. Is that typical for this time of year?/ Does it ordinarily start to pick up as we close end on the end of the year? Those days seem to make much nicer trading days than these congested one's we've been getting..
The market is at an inflection point that it is trying to break through, switching from a bearish market that turns down at cyclic resistance to a bullish market that will rally from cyclic support. Right now that resistance is around 1050. Its screwing up a lot of patterns and shrinking the daily range as neither the shorts or longs can get follow through. The only thing you can do is take profits quickly and tough it out until it either decisively breaks through or turns down. good trading
It seems to me that sub 10pt range days are the norm now, rather than the exception. There are no rules anywhere that state that we have to have 15-20pt ranges as the norm anytime in the near future. 3 years ago there were 20-30pt (or more) ranges. People expected to get back to that when the range dropped to 15-20pts. It didn't happen, so there's no reason to think that we will get back to the 15-20pt ranges anytime soon. I hope I am wrong, but meanwhile the only thing to do is adapt to the current conditions and not just hang on hoping that the range will expand again.
Daily range is down 25% from last year (2002 averaged 20.0 pts/day). So far it's averaging 14.5 pts/day which puts it's range between 1997 (13.8) and 1998 (17.7). Who knows if we'll see 20+ pts/day anytime soon. All we can do is adjust by increasing size and live with it until it does.
I miss the days were the futures would be either up big or down big what seemed like every single morning M
It would be interesting to compare the first 6 months average with the last 4 months average of this year. Do you have those numbers quickly available acrary?
i know what you're saying. the ranges of the last few months SEEM to have declined rather sharply. this is not hard to figure out. if no one else posts it, maybe i will later.