ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
Stock Market Commentary Inflation was the big story last week. I covered the details in “Bonds Try to Weigh on A Market Trying Harder to Look Past Stabilizing Inflation“. The stock market had a curiously mixed reaction that highlighted an on-going bearish divergence for the month of December. A market breadth breakdown contradicted impressive strength … Read more
TSLA Revs Higher Incredibly, Tesla Inc (TSLA) has nearly doubled since a loud thud greeted the company’s robotaxi rollout. That bearish breakdown below support at the 50-day moving average (DMA) (the red line in the chart below) now looks quite quaint. Since then, a 21.9% post-earnings gain and an initial 14.8% post-earnings pop have ignited … Read more
Stock Market Commentary It probably seems odd using “turnaround” as a descriptor for December’s trading. After all, the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ continued their respective melt-up trading action. Yet, small caps diverged and trickled downward all week. So I am intrigued by a collection of stocks that are making and often completing turnarounds from … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Holiday trading last week was deceptively lazy. The indices did a lot of churning, yet the S&P 500 and the ETF of small caps each made all-time highs at some point. A good number of individual stocks developed and followed through on bullish setups. For example, all week long, new highs greatly … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Imagine that. Key support holds firm across the major indices. A telling post-election reversal turned into proof positive that unrelenting bulls remain all-in for the stock market. Not even a further escalation in World War 3 brought pause to the rebounds off support (Russia fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile into Ukraine and … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The stock market has a natural law of “physics.” Overly enthusiastic trading, whether up or down, eventually meets an opposite and sometimes equal force. This natural instability of extremes forms a basis of my market breadth trading rules. The enthusiastic post-election surge exhausted buyers enough to create a post-election reversal. Moreover, my … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The Federal Reserve took the stage right after the U.S. presidential election. The Federal Reserve and Fed Chair Jerome Powell delivered as expected. The unrelenting bulls had no reason to stop the momentum from the post-election rally. Powell stuck to the Fed’s script and unrelenting bulls kept charging. The uneventful meeting had … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Fades were on display, especially on Thursday, as the stock market showed signs of exhaustion. Bad news in and for the semiconductor industry seemed to motivate sellers. For example, earnings for Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta Platforms (META) seemed to release some steam on hyped expectations for the AI chips both companies will … Read more
Housing Market Intro and Summary What happened in the housing market in October, 2024? A reckoning that I anticipated finally came in the form of sharply lower prices for the shares of home builders. After resisting rising mortgage rates for a month, the stock market lost its appetite. Earnings have brought a dose of reality … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Another week, another tease for bears. A fade from resistance joined market breadth in flagging bearish signals for the stock market. Yet, bears are hard-pressed to find a good risk/reward entry, especially considering the on-going uptrends for 2024. The latest confounder for bears has been the market’s general ability to ignore rising … Read more