Quite the grind, isn’t it? For the past couple of weeks, the stock market has been duking it out, between the bulls and bears, and no one seems particularly in control. On the /ES, for example, you can see how the bulls tried, for the umpteenth time, to break us above resistance, and they couldn’t even muster the failed breakout zone from the day prior. It all feels very range-bound, as rationality (the bears) keeps contending with the Fed. I would remind you, incidentally, they haven’t even started the first PENNY of quantitative tightening, and we’re already down this hard.
You can see how the bulls are trying to hammer out some kind of feeble base by way of the /NQ. Even though tech stocks have been through a total nightmare lately, even the SNAP madness didn’t push them to new recent lows.
Broadly speaking, all of this back-and-forth has actually cooled down volatility quite a bit (which probably has a lot to do with the feeling of malaise in the market).
One sliver of excitement remains natural gas. Day after day, week after week, and month after month, this beast just muscles its way higher.
My opinion is to keep your eye on something very left-field, which is Ethereum. As the square below indicates, the Animal Spirits of the market (ALL markets) have been quite contained for the past couple of weeks. Escape from this range, and you will instantly see resolution, either bullish or bearish, for equities overall.
My own positioning is super-aggressive right now, and perhaps too much so. I may have gotten ahead of myself, but luckily the market is weak enough this morning that I can take a breath and see if there are places I should lighten up somewhat. But at the moment, every penny is deployed, but the opening bell will give me a chance to see if this is BRAVE in a heroic-soldiers-on-D-Day type way, or BRAVE in a Matt-Damon-lose-your-ass-in-crypto kind of way.
