It’s all in a day’s work
I want to share a few observations on trading activity during the trading day. I will focus on the S&P 500 futures here, but may extend this (if there's interest)…
Chart of the day: S&P 500 short-term setup (6/1/15)
Overall context is a broad consolidation, with volatility contraction visible on intraday charts as a triangle. Within this area (and expect wide, “messy” definitions of the confines of the pattern—not…
Chart of the Day: S&P 500 short-term setup (5/29/15)
Bullish bias today, watching 2019 – 2025 as a reference range (not an exact level). Clearing this resistance could lead to a sharp rally. Failing to break that resistance could…
Chart of the Day: S&P 500 short-term setup (5/28/15)
Momentum begets momentum—selling, usually, leads to further selling. Yesterday sent a loud and clear warning to bears in US stocks: there is a lot of hidden bullish conviction. The rally…
Chart of the Day: S&P 500 short-term setup (5/27/15)
Yesterday's play was to not fade a break, up or down. This turned out to be correct, as the market gapped lower on the open, and did not look back…
Chart of the Day: S&P 500 short-term setup (5/26/15)
This post is the first in a series I will be extending for a week or two, focusing on short-term and intraday trading. Each day, I will be publishing a…
Taming the bear in the Russell 2000
Let me preface this by saying two things: First, I'm bullish on global stocks over even moderately long timeframes. Technicians like to call tops, but I think this bull market…
A new look at measuring trend days
For intraday traders, trend days can offer outsized rewards. For some styles of traders, much of the work of trading is focused on capturing trend days, and most of the…
Bullish setups in US stock indexes
I've been writing about this for quite a while, tweeting about it, pointing out the relative strength in smaller cap names, constructive sector flows, volatility compression that could support a…
Could stocks be ready to break out? What’s your plan?
Group-think is a problem in markets; so many smart people look at the same (pretty limited) set of information, so it's easy to understand why many people come to similar…
The S&P 500 setup heading into the Fed meeting
[This post was originally published on SeeItMarket.com, here. I have added some comments at the end of the post to update following yesterday's action. Despite the fact the market rallied…
To buy or not to buy…?
We can simplify many of the problems of technical or tactical trading to one question: assume that a market just made a large move. Do we want to fade (go…
Using spread charts
This is another post in the small series on tracking, understanding, and trading relative performance. In previous posts, we looked at two ways to track relative performance as a percent…
Buying the Russell 2000 index
A look at the technical justification and support for a long trade in the Russell 2000 index, or other US indexes.
How to trade pullbacks
I'm starting a short series of posts here on pattern recognition, focusing on simple patterns that I have found useful in actual trading. Some of my readers may have questions…
Moving averages: digging deeper
Ok, so I'll warn you up front: this one's going to be a little bit difficult. The response to my post on the 200 day moving average in the DJIA…