 |
| Whack a crisis |
The problem is bad mortgages! No, the problem is Greece! No, it's Ireland! No, Portugal! No, Greece again! The debt ceiling! Italy! S&P downgrade! Spain! France! Obama makes a speech! Foo. Every time one of these moles gets whacked, another one pops up in its place
And then they just keep coming back for more. Seems like there's just no getting ahead of them. It's enough to drive you crazy, which is pretty much the way this market has been acting for some time now.
Oops Dept.
Last night I wrote that I was "cautiously optimistic" for Wednesday. Wow, was I ever wrong. I'm sure glad I threw the "cautious" part in there, since the Dow ended up giving back all of Tuesday's gains and more to finish down an appalling 520 points.. And the funny thing is that I still don't see anything in the technicals to support this violent move.
I guess it was all due to the French mole popping his head up all of a sudden. Didn't see him coming. Whack! Thanks a lot, all you mangeurs de quiche, for tanking my IRA today. At least from what I read and heard today, I wasn't the only one caught (again) by surprise on Wednesday.
Thursday outlook
We're back to (or still in) one of those periods where the market is more news-driven than technical driven so I'm not even putting up a chart tonight. Where the market goes tomorrow, Thursday, will depend largely on which mole pops up. At least our populist president is taking it on the lam to hole up in tony Martha's Vineyard for Yet Another Vacation, so hopefully we'll be spared any more of his embarrassing market-tanking speeches for a while.
Technically, we've been oversold for days, but with this crazy whipsaw down 600, up 400, down 500 type of action, it's giving me vertigo. It's all academic at this point for me anyway since I don't trade when the VIX is at 43 (or 33 for that matter). I've been spending my time working on my program trading algorithm.
But just for laughs, with the market futures up nearly 1.5% at 1:30 AM EDT, I'm going to go waaay out on a limb and guess that tomorrow the market will be up. Will it be 10 points, 100 points, or 1000 points? I have no clue. It's anybody's guess. Do you feel lucky? This is one roulette wheel I refuse to spin until a measure of sanity returns to the casino.
Posts
For what it's worth, I expected a flat or up day on Wed too. I'm also in cash since this market is far too crazy. (Although, I may enter in a bearish TLT play once I finish researching. It's in the middle of a parabolic move due to a flight to safety. Historically, yields never stay this low for long so it should be a low risk intermediate-term play.)
ReplyDeleteDo you talk about your trading algorithm in this blog? I'm curious because I'm doing some coding of my own.
Good observations. I have not mentioned my algos here before because the topic is so involved it pretty much deserves its own blog. However, I may devote a few posts to it. Since I'm not trading right now, I have a bit of extra time. As a retired computer scientist, I find the subject of program trading fascinating.
ReplyDelete