It is February 29th today, which is a day first introduced by Julius Caesar in his major calendar reforms in 49 BC. These were a massive improvement on the old Roman calendar where accumulated errors means that the calendar regularly went seasons out of sync, which wreaked havoc with the dating of their seasonal festivals particularly, as it’s a strange thing to be celebrating mid-winter festivals in the summertime and vice-versa for the mid-summer festivals.
It’s also a lesson about how the second mouse can often get the (kudos) cheese. Caesar’s massive reform was superb, but still gained a day every 128 years, which had become obvious by the middle ages. Pope Gregory XIII tweaked the Julian Calendar slightly in 1582, removing three leap years every 400 years, a change of about 0.002% to Caesar’s great reform, and the world then gradually moved from using the Julian Calendar to the almost identical Gregorian Calendar, which is now universally used across the West apart from in some Eastern Orthodox churches, who still use the Julian calendar to calculate the dates of some moveable feasts.
Julius Caesar still retains the month of July which he named, so Gregory didn’t poach all the credit for the modern calendar from him, but if Julius hadn’t been dead for some 2050 years now, I suspect he’d still be somewhat annoyed about the way that what is essentially his calendar is now credited to Pope Gregory XIII. That said this certainly wasn’t the most shameless credit grab in history, that honor may go to Kim Jong-Il, who among many other things claimed to have invented the hamburger, though he’s been given little credit for this and his many other (um) mythical achievements outside North Korea.
Moving on to the charts, the story today is all about the rising wedges that are on the charts for SPX, ES, NDX, NQ, RUT and TF. These are all decently formed patterns and I’ll be watching with great interest here to see how these develop today.
SPX made a high on the 61.8% fib retrace target at 1963 on Friday morning and formed a clear bull flag for the rest of the day. That flag is suggesting either a retest of Friday’s high this morning, and then a return to test rising wedge support, which closed Friday in the 1920 area, or on a conviction break above 1963 the full flag target would be in the 2118 area, within the 2000-20 strong resistance zone I’ve been mentioning most days recently. That would require all these wedges to break up though, and as I said, they are very decently formed patterns. SPX 60min chart:
Rising wedge support on ES is a match with SPX, coming in at the 1915 area at the time of writing. We’ll see whether it hits. ES Mar 60min chart:
I didn’t get to my weekend post about that very bullish stat that I posted on Friday morning, but I’ve changed my view on it after a closer inspection, and am planning to prepare the stats for that for tomorrow morning’s post. What’ll I’ll say now though is that the stat is strongly supporting that the 2016 low has either been made or is close. I’d recommend not getting too married to the short side here and will be running through it in detail tomorrow.
