Thursday, December 18, 2008

Overall Bearish Day

Dave, my prefered count is as you indicated in your comment, wave A up on 11/4, wave B down on 11/21 and completing wave C up now.

If tomorrow closes below today's low then wave D down is underway. If tomorrow closes above today's high, then we wave at least one more little push higher.

I, too feel that the indexes are not in nearly as good a shape as everyone seems to think. Go back and look at the rallies off of the 9/01, 10/02 and 3/03 bottoms. Now, those were rallies. This thing feels like an overloaded single engine prop plane trying to get off the ground before the end of runway, but we must not get complacent as I do recall a couple of instances were powerful rallies seemed to emerge out of thin air.

One reason that I think we are rolling over is the Eliades New Trin index (see Market Harmonics link) has hit as all time high and is rolling over which is very bearish, while the Options Buyers Sentiment Gauge has remained relatively bearish. In other words, the small speculators and the public have gotten bullish very quickly, while the large speculators ahve remained bearish. This is one time when I do not want to be on the side of the small speculators. Also, the COTs Timer site went bearish the SP500 this week based on the commitment of trader's reports.

I think the markets will limp along until the end of the year, but I still expect selling to materialize near the end of December.

Another interesting fact that has come up is that the Dow is now forming a squeeze on a 2 day chart. This is where the 1.5 SD Bollinger bands are inside the 20 period Keltner channels indicating the possibility of an explosive move. I expect the squeeze to set up on the daily chart over the next week. By my calculations, this squeeze projects the Dow to move around 1500 points above or below the December bollinger band range, down to 6500 or up to 11000. I do not expect latter.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i love the expansion of narrow BB's; it's one of my favorite set-ups. Even more difficult to tell than the direction of a mkt is the extent of a potential move. BB expansion is one of the few things that i know of that addresses that problem.

Regards,
dave

Anonymous said...

"...but we must not get complacent as I do recall a couple of instances were powerful rallies seemed to emerge out of thin air."

I have known that feeling especially at his time of the year. It's kind of like a ghost going thru the room. Who dat ? Where did this move come from ?

Regards,
dave