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A New Dawn In The Market

By plrprousers | May 5, 2009

An interesting thing has happened in the last 6-8 weeks.There appears to be very little sellers present.  Literally.  The market has made a massive push and it really struggles to sell or stay down.It seems almost funny now how difficult it is to short anything for more than maybe 20 minutes or more.As most traders find out - fighting the market is pointless, all you can do is react to what you are given.  But it sure makes trading hard - the buy and hold guys have it locked down.

One thing I know is that no matter what these guys do that are chasing and then bidding the market so it does not sell - it will sell eventually.  The only way you actualy make money, whether day trading or longer term investing, is to  lock in profits.Until then, its not reality.  At some point they will tip the tide to the point where a majority are actually fearful of losing gains and then the selling is real.

A key pattern lately has been to break below support and then out of nowhere a massive burst of buying jams the market back to the highs.This sort of thing happens so often now, its completely expected.Most of the time this results in a new low being made, followed shortly by new daily highs as the buyers chase like crazy.

Even when the economy was plowing along at full steam, we would have 10-15% corrections all the time.   And this was when everything was just perfect (or everyone thought so).  So I am not sure what is going on now.  Several theories are in play that I think about:

  1. Shorts are completely or mostly out of the market.  The SEC messing with the short rules before caused a panic, and now there are many proposals again in regard to uptick rule and shorting.  Rather than get caught, they are staying away from day trading and longer term positioning.
  2. Manipulation factor on high.There is a group of funds or banks backed by the Fed and Treasury whose goal it is to push the market higher to form the opinion that the economy has turned.The way the market always rescues itself from the brink of disaster, the ramps into the close every friday, and other odd trading action gives this one some credibility.  Would be easy for the government to just give these guys money to push the market up.
  3. Traders are mostly gone, and computer algorithm trading takes over.This can happen also - computerized trading has taken over more of the futures market, which in turn drives stocks.  Since there is no real force to fight them and they are all doing the same thing it just keeps going.  This one I like too because the actual variance of price during the rally pushes is actually uncharacteristically low most of the time.  I have seen the dow futures push up 100 pts in 20 minutes with maybe an 8-9 point max retrace the whole time.  Sure this happens - but not this often as it does now.

Whether any of these are true, or a combination, I have no idea and we may never.  All I know is the trading action is very odd and I expect at least half if not more of this gain to be gone when this is done.  Note - I am not predicting a top, I am saying that when this is done, these idiots will undo this much faster than it actually ran up as everyone heads for the exits.  We could hit 9k, 10k etc.  I really dont think 10k is possible, with GM dust, C is dust and a few others they just dont have the fuel for the DJIA to actually push up that high in the short term.

Maybe everyone just needs to learn to trade again – this is the new market to stay!

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