New Uptrend

Today's 48 point gain in the Dow to close at 11476 provided the confirmation I was looking for after a week of directionless trading. Accordingly I'm drawing a new regression trend channel and putting up the green swing trend arrow. With a Pearson's coefficient of 0.968, this one should provide some good guidance going forward. After today, it will now take three days of sideways action, or one day of a drop below 11,425 to put the current uptrend in jeopardy.

A couple of interesting divergences today worth noting: first the VIX rose, as I thought it might, closing up 0.34%, but the Dow also rose, 0.42%. That's unusual. Also, while the ES and YM futures are both down slightly right now (1 AM EST), the recent trend in ES is not looking as strong as YM. Usually, these two are pretty highly correlated. I'm not quite sure what to make of that, but with the Dow now up four out of five (and the fifth day was only flat), I'm going to be looking for further advances as we follow the RTC channel. Even more important is that we finally closed above the 11,400 resistance level. I'd not been expecting it to come so soon after yesterday's failure to hold that line, but I did say the third time would be the charm.

Trades

Today, I bought some Ford (F) preferred, but for my IRA, not my trading account. With a 7.5% yield in a company that's looking better coming out of the Great Recession, it seemed like not a bad deal at 25.66. I did not trade my trading account today. It closed at 25.64 today.