Wednesday uncertain

The Hoot 
Actionable ideas for the busy trader delivered daily right up front

• Wednesday uncertain.
• ES pivot 1419.50 (H3 contract).
• Rest of week bias uncertain technically.
• Monthly outlook: bias uncertain.
• ES Fantasy Trader standing aside.

Recap

SPX, quarterly

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and that all the good little traders found big boxes of outsized profits under the tree today.  As the year draws to a close, I want to show you a chart provided by the great Colin Twiggs in his excellent IncredibleCharts.com newsletter.  This is the SPX in quarterly bars, something that eSignal does not give me.  Anyway, I found it interesting to see how the SPX has been channeling since November of 1997, hitting nearly identical peaks in November 1999 and November 2007.  And since the last bottom in March 2009, we have been headed generally back up to test the 1550 resistance line for the third time.  From the looks of it, that should happen sometime around July of next year.

Colin believes that this resistance is unlikely to be broken and looking at this chart, I'd have to say at this point I agree.  What's clear is that we have some early warning here of a possible top this coming summer

Tonight, once again we forgo the usual chart-by-chart technical analysis because we don't have any fresh charts to look at due to the holiday and the long weekend.  We're also facing a short trading week and the last full week of the year, and no doubt many traders will be taking a vacation around this time.  And finally, the whole fiscal cliff thing is about to hit the wall.

So far, it's going about as I predicted and I stand by my earlier guess - Emperor Nerobama, who apparently thought so little of the whole issue that he left the continental US entirely, and the Gang of 535 are going to wait until 11:59:59 PM on the 31st before announcing that they have decided to kick the can into 2013, extending the status quo until some time in the first quarter.

So in view of all of the above, I expect the see a slow drift lower in the market as everyone watches the bus trundle up to the edge of the cliff.  If by some miracle, some real agreement is reached there will be some sort of rally, otherwise I don't really see much driving force to move us higher in the last few remaining days of 2012.  And if we do go over the cliff, then load up on your shorts.  Given all of this, I'm just going to call Wednesday uncertain but with a bias lower. 

Accuracy (daily calls): 

Month    right  wrong  no call  conditional  batting   Dow
                                             average  points

April      7      9      2                    .438
May       10      7      3           2        .632
June       8      6      6           1        .600     632
July      11      2      6           1        .857     917
August     8      6      8           1        .600     -78
September  8      6      5           0        .571     -19 
October    8      5      8           0        .615     208
November   7      5      5           0        .583     135
December   6      3      1           5        .786     496

ES Fantasy Trader

Portfolio stats:  the account remains at $193,500  after 74 trades (58 wins, 16 losses) starting from $100,000 on 1/1/12.  Tonight we stand aside.