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 There are not enough superlatives in the dictionary to describe what happened today. We have borne witness to a multi-day, multi-week saga of economic warfare, tariff chaos, a rolling stock market crash – and now, an historic oversold bounce. President Trump has gone from tariffs, to tariff flexibility, to tariff reciprocity to … Read more
A Flashback On September 29, 2008, a nervous and weak stock market anxiously awaited the outcome of a Congressional vote on a $700B Wall Street bailout package known as TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. According to briefing.com, the S&P 500 (SPY) was down about … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The S&P 500 delivered only a brief respite from the bear market when it broke out above its 200-day moving average (DMA) to start the week. Two days later, the bear market reasserted itself. Another two days later, the sellers punched an exclamation mark on the bear market as a “hot” inflation … Read more
Will deregulation and tax cuts far outweigh the economic damage of broad-based and global tariffs, chaos in the Federal government, and an assortment of other economic and policy uncertainties? This question rides high on the minds of traders and investors. Where you fall on this question might determine how worried you are about the current … 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 Financial markets are supposed to act like discounting mechanisms which use the wisdom of the crowd to anticipate important events. The stock market stalled and then broke down ahead of the election. Excluding a last minute rush to buy on election day, I assumed the stock market might have a muted reaction … Read more
The stock market convincingly followed through on last week’s bullish divergence that indicated strengthening stock market breadth. At the time of the bullish divergence, AT40 (T2108), the percentage of stocks trading above their respective 40-day moving averages (DMAs), powered higher even as the S&P 500 (SPY) lost 1.0%. The index also suffered a 50DMA breakdown. … Read more
AT40 = 1.7% of stocks are trading above their respective 40-day moving averages (DMAs) (12th oversold day)AT200 = 4.1% of stocks are trading above their respective 200DMAsVIX = 75.5 (just short of financial crisis all-time high of 90)Short-term Trading Call: bullish Stock Market Commentary When I said a persistently elevated volatility index (VIX) warned us … Read more
AT40 = 28.8% of stocks are trading above their respective 40-day moving averages (DMAs) AT200 = 39.9% of stocks are trading above their respective 200DMAs (2-month low)VIX = 19.9Short-term Trading Call: cautiously bullish (see caveats below) Stock Market Commentary Presidential Decrees “Q Six hundred and twenty-three points — that’s what the Dow was down today … Read more
AT40 = 6.5% of stocks are trading above their respective 40-day moving averages (DMAs) (oversold day #8)AT200 = 11.0% of stocks are trading above their respective 200DMAsVIX = 30.4 (down 15.7%)Short-term Trading Call: bullish Commentary Pick your favorite catalyst or explanation. I am sure there is good news (or the absence of bad news) out … Read more