Stalemate

In yesterday's post, I laid out bullish and bearish arguments for the market, since we seem to be in one of those awful stand-offs between the bulls and bears. Today played out in precisely that manner.

The widely-anticipated jobs report came out. The results were interpreted as bullish. The markets zoomed higher at the opening bell. Fibonacci retracements were touched all over the place, and then the market started to soften fast. It went negative. Then positive. Then negative. Then positive. And finally ended with about 1/4th of the gain it had at its high point. Just ridiculous.

I'm 100% in puts and shorts right now. Below are my positions. Boldfaced items are puts.


Here's the Dow 30. You can see it bounces off that Fib beautifully.


And here's the Russell. For the second day in a row, it bounced off the fib. It actually managed to sneak across the line a little, but not for long.


The $SPX is pretty similar to the $INDU.


I've got a couple of long suggestions. Here's Bowater (BOW):


And, and even better one, Pico Holdings (PICO), which has the advantage of a big volume surge recently.


A few short ideas. BBD seems to have retraced within the Fib retracement nicely.


MS, like a lot of other investment banks, has likely retraced to an area where I think it doesn't have the strength to climb any higher.


Microstrategy (MSTR) blew me out a couple of weeks ago, but it was a one-day fake out. This one looks weak.


Options on the QQQQs have the advantage of being penny-priced, which is much more fair to traders.


Reynolds (RAI) is retracing back to its broken dome pattern. I also have puts on another aluminum stock, symbol AL, but the chart isn't as pretty.


Lastly, symbol RYAAY looks like a low risk/high reward short candidate.


My kids have given me some kind of bug, so I'm typing this with the chills. Even though it is 70 degrees outside, I'm going to go sit in front of the fire! Have a good weekend!