Monday, February 14, 2011

Uptrend resumed

Last Thursday I was totally convinced the market was going lower on Friday. All of the technical indicators seemed to be lined up in that direction. That proved to be the worst call I've made in the six years I've been watching the markets closely. I can only assume that it was our good friend Egyptian former president Mubarek who came to the rescue saved the day for Wall St. by taking a powder at the last minute. Sometimes news just trumps technicals. We just have to live with that.

Anyway, the coming week could be interesting because it's an options expiration week. And historically, the expiration before President's Day is particularly bad. But we're not there yet. Right now I see all three futures up (at 1:30 AM EST) and trending higher, and the VIX unable to make any headway. So I have to take my short hat off and guess that we're going higher tomorrow.

And I also have to put the green trend arrow back up. That will teach me to jump the gun. Last Thursday didn't even give us a true bearish setup, much less a sell signal. When you have a system, you have to follow it.

Performance Update

Despite my dead wrong call for last Friday, I still ended the week up 1.16%, putting me now up 5.99% year to date just about dead even with the Dow's 6.01%. One of my annual goals is to outperform the Dow, but5 I'm not too concerned at this point since the Dow has performed spectacularly so far this year. That 6% gain so far corresponds to an equivalent of nearly 46% per year.

There is no way the Dow can keep that rate up all year long. However, I hope to be able to come in near my past two years return of just over 30%. It's still early in the race, so we'll see how things develop.

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