Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Charts are never enough

We  rarely trade only on what we see in charts, nor in fundamentals.  We always defer first and foremost to price action (especially to divergences), and a lot of times to “feel”.     Yesterday was a good example — we went long late in the day on a basket (tweeted before close) of $ANR $CMI $SMH $GDXJ $OIH $XME and it certainly wasn’t what we saw in the charts (even though we liked the potential of trend-line breaks in CMI ANR) but price-action.    We started to sound more bullish in our tweets yesterday and finally purchased the basket — why?  Two reasons:
1.  We had $UA 70 in our newsletter for a few days and it finally triggered and worked very well.  Appetite for momentum was coming back into the market as retail stocks ripped.
2. Market  refused to die no matter how much bad news it was bombarded with from overseas.    As our readers know we don’t like to buy support when there’s basing — because often what happens after the base is the stock craters.  But on the flip-side when a stock refuses to die even though it’s basing on support then there’s a chance it will rally hard, which is exactly what we saw yesterday.   We didn’t think the 200SMA would hold but it was holding — and that was enough to flip our bias and to initiate a position long.
We’re out half of the basket  ( up on the worst position SMH 2%, and 4.7%  on ANR, our best position).   Stops are on lows of day on everything but will be updated after the close.
It’s still hard to trust this market as these one-day rallies have consistently been sold, however this is a good start with the break of trend-lines.
Long  $CMI 93.38 (posted real-time yesterday) and made it in our newsletter for trend-line break long.

We’re playing it tight enough (already out 1/2 and stops over break-even is tight in our books) but also leaving some room (might swing 1/2 but at least 1/4) in case today’s bounce has some legs.
We posted this yesterday as our SPY road map –$SPY now has passed several short-term resistance areas but still has to deal with the big kahuna resistance of 130.
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Update, sold 1/4 more, swinging last 1/4 into the night.