Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Response to news

Here is a 30 minute bar chart showing day session e-mini trading. Market activity during the past 24 hours has been an interesting exemplar of the "dog that didn't bark" principle.

Yesterday at 10 am the consumer confidence number was released and showed historically low levels of confidence in the current business situation. The market broke 10 points on the news (first red arrow). The interesting thing about this response is that the e-minis closed the pit session above the level at which they traded at 10:30 am, thus showing that there was no follow-through to initial selling. I thought this was a bullish development, especially since the market also closed above 1093, the level of the last low on the way to the 1112.75 high .

At 10 am this morning the market broke about 8 points on the combination of the lowest housing start number since 1963 and Bernanke's assertion that the economy was still in a fragile state ( second red arrow). But at 10:30 am a rally developed and was not accompanied by any news that I thought was important (green arrow).

The market's refusal the last two days to break further once the initial responses to bad economic news were out of the way was a bullish sign. An even more bullish sign was the rally this morning to levels higher than those at which the market stood prior to both those news releases.

I think a move to 1130 is underway. I expect to see 1200 sometime during the next three months.

7 comments:

PM said...

Hi Carl,

An excellent observation.

Thanks.

Kindest regards,

PM

kcounty said...

carl - any way you could Tweet your text updates too?

t!

Moby Pixel said...

Carl,
That first 30 minutes of your trade this morning you must have felt like Nostradamus. Great work my friend.
If today's bad news has pushed us higher, I have cause for concern for my short positions seeing as how tomorrow is initial claims and Friday is new homes data (both I expect to be poor numbers). People keep thinking the market can't go up with negative data but we have rallied for months on bad data. People also keep asking "how can the market go up in a bleeding economy?"

(now standing on a soap box)

Here are MY reasons

1. Triple Leveraged ETF's in the hands of the masses (333,333 investment with power of 1,000,000). We saw how this helped kill the financials but we have not yet seen the power this can have to the upside. In theory, we could see all time highs on the market using 1/3 the funds previously required.

2. Growing interest in the markets (I'm sure Carl has many more hits on the site per day since the latest pull back from 1150) This brings more players to the table.

3. The stock market does not equal the economy.
Apple; Great earnings = stock down Homes; Not selling = stock up

4. Fed pumping money in the markets... and I don't think they care about EW

5. People still sitting on Cash. If we break above 1150...

I'm off to watch the close.

Cheers!
Nick

andi said...

carl:
that's were contrarian play comes in...it is a little sneaky...it is to assure longs that market is strong..and bam it goes down...

Anonymous said...

andi, interesting read about market manipulation:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-spy-getting-jump-key-levels-quant-algo

catherine said...

This is what I wrote in response to a posting of your magazine covers on a market group. I hope you consider it fair.

Carl Futia is always bullish.(over 90% of the time) He was bullish at the top in 2007, He was bullish all the way down in 2008. (You can check days at random in his previous posts)
Even if the market dropped 1000 points, he will still say it is going to 1200. He reminds me of the man in Monty Pythons Holy Grail where after having all his limbs and head cut off, he still shouts 'going to get you'

However on a very short term basis he has good calls as long as you dont mind trading long only all the time. He cuts looses fast, has good interday ranges and his other forecasts are often reasonably accurate. Ironically he seems better on some of the markets he doesnt trade when forecasting.

Carl Futia said...

No,Catherine, I don't think it is fair. The Monty Python remark is particularly contemptible.

Let me rewrite the first part of your missive in a more balanced way.

"Carl Futia is always bullish. He started his blog in April of 2005, about 58 months ago. The 2007-09 bear market lasted 17 months, so on this very rough basis he has been right about the market's direction 71% of the time. You decide for yourself whether his clear bullish bias makes sense for you.

"That being said, he started posting his trades on his blog at the bull market top in October 2007. The vast majority of them were on the long side. His posted trades in 2008, a big down year for the market, showed a return of 86%. Doing so well while trading against the direction of the major trend shows quite a bit of skill. He followed up this performance by posting a return of 89% in 2009."