T2108 Update (July 1, 2016) – Almost Like Nothing Happened: Trading Lessons from a Wild Week

(T2108 measures the percentage of stocks trading above their respective 40-day moving averages [DMAs]. It helps to identify extremes in market sentiment that are likely to reverse. To learn more about it, see my T2108 Resource Page. You can follow real-time T2108 commentary on twitter using the #T2108 hashtag. T2108-related trades and other trades are … Read more

Global Markets Synchronize Into A State of Calm That Does NOT Equate to Safety

(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on February 19, 2012. Click here to read the entire piece.) {snip} Nassim Taleb has been on a tour promoting his new book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” He provides related links and interviews on his Antifragile web site where he … Read more

Obama and the Stock Market: From Buy the Bottom to Sell the Top?

As fears quickly rise that President Obama wants to wipe out American business and kill the stock market (as some like Jim Cramer would have you believe), I took a trip down memory lane to watch Obama’s (now forgotten?) famous call to buy the stock market right around the March bottom: Less than 12 months … Read more

In Honor of Dow 10K v3.0, A Review of T2108 and T2107

I have not reviewed T2108, the percentage of stocks trading above their 40-day moving average (DMA), or its close cousin T2107, the percentage of stocks trading above their 200-day moving average, since late April (click here for the review). For most of the intervening weeks and months, the message has remained the same: over-bought and … Read more

Assorted Thoughts and Trades for September 25, 2009

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

Which Contrarians Are Correct About the Stock Market?

When everyone is a contrarian, no one is a contrarian. I consider this a corollary to the famous quote from Humphrey Neill: “When everyone thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong” (from a book I really enjoy but inconsistently apply “

VXX Attempts Another Bottom

The VXX is an ETF that “offers exposure to a daily rolling long position in the first and second month VIX futures contracts and reflects the implied volatility of the S&P 500 index at various points along the volatility forward curve” (from Yahoo!Finance). This means it offers a method for placing bets on the direction … Read more

Big CAT Breakout Signals Bulls Are Far From Finished

Caterpillar, Inc. (CAT) closed out Tuesday’s trading with an impressive 6% gain on volume 58% higher than average. *Chart created using TeleChart: For six weeks, CAT bounced inside a small trading channel as it consolidated impressive gains from the July lows and July’s earnings report. CAT is plowing ahead despite lingering and extremely high skeptical … Read more