Do people not pay attention to volume at all? I am starting to begin they don’t after listening to all the typical talking loud-mouths this weekend. They all clamored and were happy the indexes were up 15% to 20% last week. Yet not a single person anywhere mentioned that volume was lower and lower each day as the rally went along. They also did not mention that we were right near/at the 50 day moving averages which are in a downtrend on all the indexes. Leaving these two key facts out made anything they said irrelevant.
There was always a possibility of waking up and seeing a market running away today but the truth is this market is predictable yet insanely impossible to trade unless you are a daytrader. After my initial short positions before the selloff really started, things have been harder to manage as shorts are not going down in a smooth line like they should in a bear market. This is making for a very difficult trading environment and why unless your timeframe is 10 seconds it is not wise to get very long this market.
The fact that after a holiday short week of light volume that we can come back and selloff so violently should have more people concerned than there are. But with the put/call ratio under 1.0 and the VIX still not at new highs, we simply do not have the fear needed to get this selloff over. Instead too many are “hoping” that economic moves made recently will help the market. In my opinion, it only prolongs it.
If it is golden parachutes, ridiculous bonuses via options, program trading, online trading under $5, decimalization, dark pool trading, Regulation FD, Sarbanes Oxley, no uptick rule, or the government interfering in the stock market, the truth is that we do not have the free market that we once did. This is why we are seeing the recent volatility that we have seen since September.
Until this volatility ceases to be a problem, there is no way new shorts or new longs are going to be safe enough to load up on here. Instead small positions are STILL the call of the wild and there will be no way I place anything over 5% in my portfolio in one issue unless it is a PERFECT short setup or a PERFECT long setup. I am sick of taking small losses and only buying/shorting a few shares of the stocks that do well. Until my patterns show up, it is going to be a long dark period of cash holding.
However, holding cash now, after all the gains we got in the bull from 2003-2007 and the short positions that we still have on now like SPW 71% SPG 53% GGB 64% MOS 70% SDA 79% AMX 47% AAPL 44% LLL 31% RDK 17% RIMM 59% K 18% ARB 72% CAJ 37% POT 64% CEO 40% ATHR 46% AMSG 23% CPRT 31% APD 53% CETV 83% OKE 41% PLCE 23% TITN 53% CYT 64% SBAC 57% IPHS 35%, is OK with me.
I am a very patient trader and have recently fell into a trap where my largest positions don’t do as well as the less-sure smaller positions do.
