Thursday stock market forecast

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

• Thursday higher.
• ES pivot 2168.42.  Holding above is bullish.
• Friday bias uncertain technically.
• Monthly outlook: bias lower.
• YM futures trader: short at 17,670.

Recap

Well there you have it.  I finished off the month of August with a record eight calls of "uncertain".  Looking back over the month, I'm still not sure what I could have done differently.  The market traded the month an about as tight a range as I've ever seen.  On Wednesday the Dow dropped another 53 points to end the months almost exactly where it began.  I do think we'll start to see a return to the usual swing of things after Labor Day but we're not quite there yet.

And speaking of, I will be taking all of next week off.  The Night Owl is going on a road trip and while I do expect to have Internet access, it won't be with my usual high bandwidth multi-montior setup.  I can't really put the blog together on a little 7" tablet so it's just as well it's a holiday week.

In the meantime, we cast a weather eye to the charts to see if they can tell us which way the wind will blow on Thursday.

The technicals

Market index futures: Tonight, all three futures are higher at 1:33 AM EDT with ES up 0.18%. 

ES daily pivot: Tonight the ES daily pivot falls from 2175.08 to 2168.42.  That puts ES above its new pivot so this indicator now becomes bullish.

Accuracy: 

Month    right  wrong  no call  conditional  batting   Dow
                                             average  points
January    9      5       5           0       0.643    1433
February   9      3       5           3       0.800    1133
March      8      6       6           1       0.600     222
April      6      4       8           2       0.667     416
May        9      3       4           4       0.813     756
June       8      5       7           1       0.643    1393
July       5      6       6           2       0.539    -304
August     1      3       8           0       0.000     120

     And the winner is...

The first days of most months are historically bullish and tonight for the first time in a long time we're seeing futures actually guiding higher.  So with that and some reversal signs on the charts I'm actually going to make a call for a change: Thursday higher.

YM Futures Trader

No trade tonight.