This post is for Fridays session, October 30th.
The market sold off like fiercely on Friday and took the Dow down about 250 points. The S&P was off about 30 points. I did think that a re-test of the Wednesday and Thursdays low would come, but not so fast. I thought we had at least one more day to top out for the counter trend rally. There was news that came out on Friday, not really sure what it was to tell you the truth, but I could only imagine that it wasn’t good and the market reacted to it. It is to be expected.
Let me tell you, that in the month of September and October, the general public has become bullish. The last two months has only produced paltry gains when compared to the gains of the previous six months. That is where all of the money has been made. The general public is always late to the party and I don’t imagine that this time is going to be any different.
Mondays session is going to tell all, at least for now. What I mean is as I was telling you last week that the Dow has been outperforming the S&P and that was a problem. Well, it is not only the S&P that it is outperforming but the other index’s, but in a bigger way.
Based on my experience and I did not see this or hear this from anywhere, but years of seeing price action at work, the institutions are lightening up their riskier positions and reallocating equity assets in the high quality Dow Stocks. I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, if I remember correctly. That is pretty typical at market tops
The Nasdaq Index is at a double bottom from its most recent pivot point low, something that the S&P is thinking about doing, to follow suit. The Russel 2000 Index has already overwhelmingly broke its most recent pivot low, by a wide margin. The Dow on the other hand has not broken down yet at all, but is sitting right on a major trend line support.
So, the Dow is the strongest, next comes the S&P 500, then the Nasdaq and lastly the Russel 2000. If the Dow holds and moves higher, the other indexes will only be making a counter trend rally, but will still remain in a down-trend, stopping at overhead resistance. Once the Dow does break down, all of the other Indexes will only go down that much farther and faster. There is a lot of room for the market to move back to the middle of its range of the last 8 months.
The last thing I will say about all of this tonight is, “Earnings”. I don’t follow this much either, but just the big picture. The projected earning that Standard & Poors are putting out for the S&P 500 for next year are a bit of a fairy tale. They have been constantly wrong and now they are painting a wonderful rebound of large proportion in earnings. Anything is possible, but I doubt it. I had heard, according to Bloomburg, that the S&P has had declining earnings for 9 straight quarters and only this last quarter have they been able to increase earnings. Those increases are from very depressed levels, not that hard. The increase in earnings in my estimation is coming from cost cutting in various forms. You can only cut cost so much and for so long, before you can not cut anymore. Where are the increases in sales going to come from. No one is spending and no one is lending and money??? INTERESTING.
That is why, the market is going to adjust itself to reflect where it is going to be in 6-9 months from now, probable lower. Just now the S&P is turning their earnings, like this month. If you invest in these companies now, you are going to pay way to much. But that is what the public does. You needed to be invested at least 6 months ago to be able to enjoy some of this rally, not two months ago, like I talked about at the top of todays post.
We need to see what the Dow is going to do in Mondays session. If it to breaks support, then all of the indexes will have downside momentum working for it. But if it can hold, there is now room for it to clear 10,300, a complete 50 retracement from it’s all time high. The S&P numbers for the same retracement are 1120. We got close.
The sentiment numbers backed off just a little last week. It is sitting at 48% Bulls. A reading of 55% is considered bearish. We only got as high as 51. One last push to the numbers above could push the reading to 55%, the big word in there is COULD.
Friday’s session was incredible. So many great clear signals all day long. I only took one trade and it was split up, what I call a “T-2″. The first half for +1 point and the second part for 3 1/2 points. I was in the market for less than 1 minute on the first part and 4 more minutes for the second part. I really only had my screen open for 15 minutes, start to finish. There will be plenty of other trading days to capture higher point returns. But my daily goal was meet, no struggle, no fuss, no mess. Just the way I like it.
Until tomorrow