Thursday higher

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

• Thursday higher, low confidence.
  
• ES pivot 1835.58.  Holding abive is bullish.
• Friday bias higher technically.
• Monthly outlook: bias higher.
• ES Fantasy Trader standing aside

Recap

I hope everyone had a happy New Year.  Tonight we say goodbye to 2013 and start off afresh for another trip around the sun matching wits with that wily old Mr. Market.  December certainly went out with a bang - now let's see if the January effect is anywhere to be found.

The technicals (daily)

The Dow: With a mid-week holiday, the natural ebb and flow of the markets is badly interrupted.  So we move out to the weekly chart and find, somewhat surprisingly, no bearish signs at all.  In fact we even have a newly completed bullish stochastic crossover there as we continue to ride the weekly upper BB higher.  No sign of a pull-back here.

The VIX:  The last VIX candle, from Tuesday was an inverted hammer that just touched the 200 day MA before retreating.  Though the indicators are not yet overbought, I consider this a bearish sign.

Market index futures: Tonight he market futures are still closed, so no guidance here.  Tuesday's pop did cancel the two preceding dojis though.  And we still have some room before hitting the upper BB.  We'll have to see where this leads.

ES daily pivot: Tonight the pivot remains at 1835.58.

We omit the remaining charts tonight as not particularly relevant.

Performance:

Here are my final performance stats for  2013.  I didn't do as well as last year and am a bit disappointed I didn't beat my benchmark, the Dow, although I can't really complain about a 23% annual return.  And in any case, with the Dow having a truly outstanding year and its best performance since 1995, the bar was set very high indeed.

My account was hurt by the underperformance of my sub-portfolio of REIT's which got absolutely hammered in 2013 every time someone even said the word "taper", which was often.  The ESFT suffered a few very large losses that proved the adage that "the trend is your friend" and when you ignore that, you pay for it.

For the record here is how my trading account has done: since I started keeping records

        Michele     Dow    IRA     ESFT
2007    -10.83%     6.43%
2008    -16.68%   -33.84%
2009     30.57%    18.88%
2010     31.99%    11.03%
2011     -0.01%     5.51%
2012     27.52%     7.29%  10.19% 93.50%
2013     22.94%    26.48%  11.24% 10.63%



Accuracy (daily calls):

Month    right  wrong  no call  conditional  batting   Dow
                                             average  points

January    0      0      0           0       0.000       0

     And the winner is...

With a good fraction of the usual guidance missing toinght, I'm going to have to make this call partly on momentum and partly on history, and they both suggest Thursday higher.

ES Fantasy Trader

Portfolio stats:  the account begins the new year at $100,000 as we wait for the right moment to enter our first trade of 2014.