Love So Deep, Kills You In Your Sleep

I'm no better. I just know I'm not any better of a person than any of the bulls that frequent this board.

When the market is roaring higher........when bears like me are getting slaughtered .........it's only natural that you gloat. You announce how the market is just going to keep going up forever. You wish for the destruction of all the bears. And you offer up reasons why It's Different This Time and there will never be a down market in your lifetime.

So - as the kids say, good on you, because I'm no better than that. The market is a battlefield. Wiser souls - of which many claim to be, but hardly any of them are - are truly neutral, and they position themselves to try to take advantage of the ebb and flow. Mere mortals, like your humble narrator, tend to be more dogmatic. History - and human nature - tend to make the vast majority of them bulls. And a vanishingly small number are bears. So - join hands around the campfire, and let's sing!

I hate you. You hate me. We're a trading family. With a big fat drop, and a knife from me to you. This one day, you get the screw.

So allow me to remind everyone of the disposition just four trading sessions ago. Last Friday, June 1st. Hardly a blip in time. The Dow had made another lifetime closing high. Let's review some of the comments offered up:

Permabull NewEquity wrote: I just bought 100 DIA calls mid-day for the ride back up through all time highs. No resistance at all and we should break 14k Dow in the next 3 weeks according to my tech analysis guy.

John (B) predicted, regarding the S&P 500, whose closing price today was 1490.72: "Putting these numbers in my model, the 500 fair value today is 2,300...and based on earnings for next year, fair value would be about 2,800."

And, lastly, Beanie11111 declared the bottom for a number of stocks: "...AKAM has bottomed...SBUX has bottomed.....WFMI has bottomed." As a follow-up, in the mere four days since that post, those stocks have declined 3.2%, 5.9%, and 6.5%, respectively. So I guess some people have different understanding of bottoms than others.

Suffice it to say, the past three days have been very good for me. Indeed, I had trouble deciding what charts to show, because they are all gorgeous. Every single one - every one - of my dozens of positions pushed way higher today. I even made some very profitable intraday option trades - both long and short! - with the Russell 2000.

The Dow fell 1.48% today. And, after the regular market closed, the ETFs on the indexes just kept falling. The DIA wound up down 1.96%.

I actually would not be surprised to see a very short, very sharp drop first thing in the morning followed by a rip-roaring push up. Looking at this channel, it seems to me the selling is a touch overdone (on the very short term) at this point. You hear me, fellers? I'm not saying we're going to enjoy another 4th day plunge. Nice as it would be.


Zooming in closer, you can see what I mean. Now, of course, all trendlines are eventually broken. And if the one shown here is decisively snapped, it could be a new ball game. But the past 11 months have made me paranoid, and although the last 3 days have been sensible, I still don't trust this market or its participants.


Akamai (AKAM) hasn't plunged as fast as I hoped, but it's doing OK. It's still a very nice pattern, and I've got some nice green on this one.


CSX is way the hell above its trendline, and it is sporting a cute little head and shoulders pattern to boot.


CVX would definitely pop up if the market strengthened, but that would just give me another opportunity to add to my bearish position.


I closed my Deere (DE) puts today at a nice profit. Not because I think the stock is going to be strong. But only because I'd like to re-enter them at a better price, assuming the market "recovers" some in the very short-term.


The Asian markets are having a touch of reality. My EWM (Malaysian market) short is doing nicely. I daresay the Asian markets will kind of freak out during their Friday session, which might make our Friday session interesting as well. But, if forced to bet, I'd say we'll probably close higher, Asian freakout and end-of-week jitters notwithstanding.


InfoSys (INFY) finally cracked its neckline, although it still seems to behave stronger than I'd like to see. Would you plunge, already?


JC Penney (JCP) - on which I bought puts yesterday - had a nice fall due to weak retail sales. Of course, a true break of this neckline - - - the pattern is only just forming now - - - would make these puts fantastically profitable.


Merrill Lynch (MER), along with my other investment bank shorts, soured (for the bulls) today.


Oh, a couple of final comments to two users before the video. TomTheTrader, please stop posting your URL. I consider that an ad, and I'm going to be more consistent about nuking comments that are ads in any way. And Gary - for goodness sake, we get it. COT, COT, COT. Message received and understood. Lordy. Oh, and as for you readers that only show up on big down days like this......shame on thee!

Anyway........

The Indexes Change Places

I've noticed - anecdotally, of course - an interesting trend recently. It occurred to me when I went to the Maker Faire in nearby San Mateo, which is basically a get-together of do-it-yourself types. And I don't mean Bob Villa. I'm talking about people who make their own stuff, from robots to housing to computers to clothes.

As I milled around - and this was a very crowded event - I noticed how many nerds, geeks, and Melvins (my term) there were. And I was transported back to 1980, when I attended the West Coast Computer Faire (there's that olde English spelling again....) as a youngster.

It seems to me there is a backlash going on amongst nerd-dom with respect to computers. In 1980, you had to be pretty hip and with-it (ahem....) to really be into personal computers. Nowaways, anyone with a room temperature IQ has one. Sort of the same with cell phones.........if you had a mobile phone in, say, 1986, you were hot stuff. These days, even homeless people have them.

Another thing I've seen supporting this trend is the recently bestselling book The Dangerous Book for Boys, which features not the latest information on PlayStation 3 but instead discusses kites, marbles, and handy Latin phrases. If this cultural counter-trend has anything to it, I find it all quite charming.

As long as I'm ignoring charts, I'll also say that I just finished The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. On pages 224-228, he writes:

In 1995, the finance ministry of Malaysia suggested that [short sellers] needed to be punished [with] mandatory caning....Napoleon deemed the short seller "[an] enemy of the state." Short selling was illegal in New York State in the early 1800s while England banned it outright in 1733 and did not make it legal again until the middle of the nineteenth century...shorting was denounced on the [U.S.] Senate floor as one of "the great commercial evils of the day"'...one reason why there isn't more short selling is that most people are not psychologically built to endure constant scorn.

We poor bears! Hated throughout history.

I noticed MarketWatch was touting the idea that the S&P was at a new high. Not quite. With their tortured logic, the S&P's high today was higher than the highest closing price. Well, yeah, that's true. But that's comparing apples and oranges. Who cares?

According to my data, the highest price reached by the S&P on an intraday basis was 1552.87 on 3/24/2000, and the highest closing price was 1527.57 on the same day Today's high was 1529.87 and the close was 1525.10. It's a pretty sure bet there will be a new high on the S&P 500 tomorrow, but let's at least wait for it to happen before touting the news, shall we? Anyhoo, here's the $INDU:


The indexes, until recently, have had all their firepower in the Dow 30. That was not the case today. The Dow actually inched down in price, whereas the Russell 2000 blasted higher by 1.21%. It seems the small caps are finally playing catch-up.


The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) inched down today and continues to shape a nice topping pattern.


I like to look for stocks that are far away from their supporting trendline and seem to be flipping around to a downward direction. CSX fits this.


ESS looks like it is inching up toward its neckline, which could make for a relatively low-risk head and shoulders pattern to play on the short side.


JC Penney also is forming its head and shoulders cleanly. Of course, one must be cautious to trade incomplete patterns, as a single price bar would render it moot.


KRC is another homebuilder with a similar pattern forming like ESS.


On a final note - one frequent commenter, Gary, has mentioned the Commitment of Traders many times in the comments section. I was intrigued and did some basic research, but I find this data difficult to interpret. I guess I'm a sucker for easy-to-read graphs. I would appreciate his illuminating this issue in the comments section to give us a bit of a tutorial on the subject, since it sounds interesting; thanks in advance.

Ode to Steve Jobs

All the world was abuzz today about the iPhone. This is one gorgeous, sexy, amazing-looking product. Although I've used a PC for years, I bought my first Macintosh early in 1984, and I worked at Apple for a few years. Steve Jobs has been my hero since I was about 14 years old, and the adventures he has had in his business life make Odysseus look like a bore.

Steve Jobs has more style in his pinkie than Bill Gates has in his whole body. And even though the Google founders could buy and sell Steve Jobs many times over, I doubt there's anyone in the country that would opt for lunch with the Google guys over Steve Jobs. He's amazing. As is the press coverage....the top story on CNN!


As well as Fox.....


So it's not surprise that Apple exploded higher today....on volume of over 100 million shares! It wasn't that many years ago that the entire stock market traded 100 million shares. Now just one stock can do it. Just look at this graph!


This is a very late posting, so I'm going to have to tear through it. Boeing (BA) still looks like it's changing trends.


COF, mentioned many times in this space, is moving achingly slowly, but at least it's moving down.


Express Scripts (ESRX), a favorite here, looks terrific. Lower lows and lower highs are clearly intact.


CSX still looks good on the short side.


And FTO is looking like it has a real chance at completing its head and shoulders pattern.


HES is moving nicely lower with all the oil stocks (yep, I got blown out of those OIH calls first thing this morning).


And Hilton (HLT) is obeying the "trendline changing from support to resistance" phenomenon.


Oh, and then there's RIMM. I set my stop too tight on this. It got killed today - obviously because of Apple. I mean, the Blackberry is the most boring piece of crap on the planet compared to the sexy iPhone. Who wants one of those ugly Blackberries now? That's so 2002.


RTI continues to behave as any bearish pick should.


...as does SIE...


...and TSO...


It's late, so I'd better publish this. I hopefully will have more time tomorrow for some general market analysis. Thanks for stopping by!

Baby Got Redback

As regular readers know, although I'm a bear (in both real life and my Second Life), I do publish bullish charts some of the time (maybe 10%). One stock I've consistently point out as having a handsomely bullish pattern is RBAK, which I first mentioned over a year ago in my September 2005 post. At the time, RBAK was about $9 per share. It was purchased today for $25 per share, and the stock price actually closed north of that.

The calls I bought on RBAK a month or so ago more than tripled in price over a small amount of time. Now this is a beautiful example of an inverted head and shoulders pattern in action!


What's funny to me is some highly-paid analyst published a report in the wee hours of this morning stating, in brief, (1) RBAK had reached its target price, so they were downgrading it (2) a buyout was not likely "in the near future" (which, given the outcome, I guess meant within the next 30 minutes following the publication of the report).. Wow, what an embarassment. Analysts have never been worth a sack of crap, have they?


The $INDU reached yet another all-time intraday high today (turd monkeys!) but closed down a bit. The divergence between the RSI and the price action is absolutely huge. Come ON, you stupid market, would you fall already? Jesus H. Christ!


The NASDAQ continues to look weaker than the U.S. stock market as a whole.


...and the Dow Transports continue to act (alone) in a truly bearish fashion.


CDX, a short I've suggested before, had a nice down day - - I suppose led by FedEx's action.


And speaking of FedEx, another item I've suggested shorting, it had a nice down day, although it certainly was no demolition of the stock. These things can take time, I suppose.


One could make a flimsy argument that GOOG is sporting a petite head and shoulders pattern. I wouldn't even mention it. Oops, too late. Anyway, I have high (low) hopes for GOOG in January.


Finally, TSO continues to be well behaved. This looks like a nice, fat toppy pattern to me.


Someone commented (and let me say, I really appreciate the comments section - - I read it religiously) that yesterday's graph of the coming disaster in Medicare has nothing to do with stocks or the financial markets. I dunno, I think the insolvency of the United States will surely be germane at some point.

Oh, I forgot. Liquidity. There's liquidity. And all that money needs a place to go. (Where it came from, no one knows - - actually they do - - leverage, leverage, leverage. Which, oh, is a two-edged sword). Anyway, liquidity is the current This Time It's Different argument. Just like how the Internet's productivity enhancement changed everything and justified the valuations of 1999.

People just never learn. Never. I simply cannot wait for those Liquidity twits to get blown to hell. Then at least we can wait a few years before we have to endure them again with another fabricated story.

Burying the Week

This was one of those days that the market went up but my all-short portfolio actually went up too. I guess I can make a good decision now and then.

I tossed out a 'Second Life' reference a couple of times, but hardly anyone said anything. Maybe I'll just give it a miss. Here's my avatar in case you happen to see me. No surprise, eh?


The market exploded higher earlier in the day, but a lot of those gains melted off. The market was still up (in most cases), but most indices are sporting a nice shooting star.


I've been short gold for a couple of weeks, and that seems to be heading in the right direction finally (as viewed via the $XAU).


I've taken a few stabs at Black & Decker (BDK). Finally it took a tumble! Just look at the volume today, too.


I remain long puts on Capital One. It's only inching down slowly, but I still really like this pattern.


I entered a new position on CSX today (buying puts).


GOOG is a bit of a fascination of mine. It's getting a little weaker every day. They will be reporting earnings in January. Obviously a disappointment there (as happened a year before) is the only thing that could really take the wind out of this stock's sails.


I'm also still short Goldman (GS), my favorite investment bank pick now.


HYDL is starting to behave well to the downside.


RIMM gives quarterly guidance next week on the 21st. The past couple of days gave RIMM some upside, but today's shooting star pattern gives me some comfort. It seems the market is saying, "oh, no you don't" to any sustained strength here.


I see a lot of quitters in the comments section. That's totally your decision, of course. Just try not to be rude on your way out the door. You may be back!