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 Writing about financial markets always feels surreal when tragedy and disaster dominate the news headlines. My cognitive dissonance gets particularly poignant when the stock market does not reflect the scale and scope of events. As massive fires rage in Los Angeles causing to-date $135B to $150B in economic losses and loss of … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Investopedia defines the Santa Rally very precisely: “A Santa Claus rally refers to the sustained increases found in the stock market during the last five trading days of December through the first two trading days of January.” Based on this definition, Santa is failing…and just as the stock market risks a January … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The dust is settling ever so slightly on the stock market’s post-Fed plunge. The stock market shifted from euphoria to oversold on a day that woke up everyone to a potentially new market reality. I say “potentially” because all year the market has been hit with bearish catalysts and quickly bounced back … Read more
Stock Market Commentary If you followed December’s deterioration in market breadth and/or paid attention to the inflation numbers and the smoke signals from the Federal Reserve, today’s market sell-off does not surprise you. What surprises me at the time of writing is the complete collapse in market breadth. The stock market essentially plunged from euphoria … 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 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
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
Stock Market Commentary Bearish engulfing patterns flag potential tops at the end of uptrends. They represent the potential exhaustion of buying power as price first opens above the previous day’s high and then closes below the previous day’s close. Thus, the latest round of bearish engulfing patterns in major indices and major stocks should be … Read more