In recent days, I’d give my charting a grade of “A” and my trading execution about a “C+“. I have been, on the whole, doing NOTHING with my positions (which is good), but I definitely mucked things up a bit monkeying around with those short-dated SPY and QQQ puts. Just look at this minute bar chart of the /NQ and see how the explosive move higher was absolutely blown to smithereens. I watched the puts I dumped both go up triple digits. Not a good feeling!
Oddly, my best percentage gain isn’t from some hot-shot crazy tech company but from boring old General Motors, the ancient maker of such gems as the Aztek. Those puts are up about 53%, and even after I wrote about it this morning, GM started to tumble all the faster. So………yay!
I believe that over the past three trading weeks, we have seen a very important shift from bullish to bearish. The market is fun for me to trade again (the aforementioned puts notwithstanding), and my portfolio value is growing daily. The Fibonacci value at 4528.71 took some serious punching to conquer (red rectangle below) but I think we’re safely on the other side now.
This sets us up, I believe, for a relatively easy ride to about 4300 on the /ES (4309.26 to be precise), which is a 4% drop. B.F.D., right? Well, hey, I’m not about to spit in the face of a 4% drop considering what the REST of 2023 was like! So, yeah, come on over here, Ms. Negative 4%, and let me give you a big smooch!
At the same time, I think the VIX is winding up to launch into the lower 20s (again, a pitifully modest goal, but – – see above).
The small caps is an interesting creature, because it is retreating from its breakout level (e.g. it never broke out). The red lines below represent its Fibonaccis. Obviously I’d love to see us traverse back to the lower one, but that would take a bit of a miracle.
Whereas the event-of-the-decade was the CPI on Thursday morning, the PPI on Friday morning is, I suppose, not nearly as big a deal. Thus we can actually see what the market is going to do with virtually no external forces: that is to say, no meaningful economic news, no earnings news of note, no FOMC, no nothing. Just plain old supply and demand.
See you then!
