ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
Goldman Sachs (GS) has been a bellwether stock since the November lows. GS displayed relative strength when its March lows remained around 50% higher than the November lows. Since then, GS has followed a strong, upward trendline that led the general stock market before hitting its most recent peak in October. However, in November, the … Read more
When I examined the trading patterns in Google’s stock (GOOG) between earnings reports, I found little consistency for forming a trading strategy. For October’s earnings cycle, I chose to play one of the few promising historical patterns: 67% of the times that GOOG opened up in response to earnings, the maximum close until the next … Read more
RIMM officially began its share repurchase period on Monday, November 9. Since then, the intra-day trading seems to provide evidence that RIMM (or some other large buyer!) has gone to work purchasing shares. The chart below shows a 10-day chart of RIMM with trading broken into 30-minute blocks. The first 30-minutes of trading on Monday, … Read more
On November 5, Research In Motion (RIMM) announced a buyback of up to $1.2B in shares starting November 9 and lasting for up to a year. When I read this announcement, I pounced on the stock the minute pre-market trading opened. This was quite a mental exercise for me because I had just closed out … Read more
It turns out that the lower lows I noted in T2108, the percentage of stocks that are trading above their 40-day moving averages (DMAs), were indeed leading to at least one more lower low. T2108 fell dramatically today, from 48% yesterday to 23% today. This breaks the July lows as well as the series of … Read more
Just thinking about writing this piece makes me cringe. After celebrating gold’s fresh 18-month highs yesterday, it occurred to me that I need to review my biggest whiff of this year: Goldman Sachs (GS), affectionately called “Government Sachs.” I could just as easily call this one “how I missed out on at least 900% returns.” … Read more
Thursday’s stock market sell-off could finally be the start of the sharp Fall correction I have speculated about in various forms for months now. The extent of the technical damage and the heavy distribution of stock certainly seem to have put a ceiling on stock prices for now. Solar stocks were heavily hit as speculative … Read more
We have all heard the claims that traders take the summer off, choosing to exchange their flashing computers for the calm, cool breezes of the beaches of the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, etc… Yet, year after year, it has appeared to me that summers deliver plenty of noteworthy trading action. I finally decided to take a … Read more
Today has been a wild day in the financial markets, and I almost hesitate to jot down my thoughts before the close of trading. However, I will be shutting things down to get the weekend started as soon as possible, so I am writing now while thoughts remain fresh. There is no one theme I … Read more