Counting with Doug: Financing a trip to Lake Tahoe solely with blackjack winnings?

Food for thought

Anniversary of 1987 stock market crash

The market crash of 1987 was twenty-four years ago today. Remember? I was studying for my law school entrance exams, not trading. But I can recall it was big news, dominating every television broadcast. “Older” people then could remember the Depression, but no one else had experienced a true “panic” in their lifetimes. It was […]

Earnings season may be winding up, but the season for rationalizations is in full swing!

With the market plunging almost 20% in three weeks at its worst, you knew it wouldn’t be long before some short term speculators were turned into long term investors! Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe has listed some of his favorite bear market rationalizations and bromides at Boston.com: ■Venture capitalists: “We are counter-cyclical investors.’’ “Economic […]

Trading the news — mining for words

With the markets hinging on every development in Washington lately, as the debt ceiling debate lingers on, “trading the news” is itself more frequently in the news. But with markets as big as they are, as fast as they are, and dominated by peripatetic machine algorithms, there may be little time any more for actually […]

Check out this pattern!

Fans of technical analysis — and especially those who appreciate giant head-and-shoulders patterns — should be salivating over the current one-year S&P 500 chart: It’s intersting to not that both shoulders and the head have formed within this calendar year, making the remainder 2011 sort of a referendum on whether the pattern will play out. […]

Need to worry? Here’s some fuel for your fire . . .

If the market is going to climb the wall of worry, I figure lots of people will need stuff to worry about. Therefore, as a public service, I offer to you Brett Jensen’s “10 reasons to Worry about the second half of 2011” from the Seeking Alpha site. My favorite: the chance for an accelerated […]

Will the market stay positive for the year?

It’s nice to take some longer-term perspective every once in a while (or maybe all the time)!: With that in mind, there is one level I will be watching this week — 1258, where the S&P 500 closed on New Year’s Eve. I want to see if we “go red” by the half-way point or […]

Look where the S&P 500’s 200-day moving average is

The 200 day moving average for the S&P 500 index is now perched at 1259 — just a point higher than where we closed out 2010, at 1258. Look for convergence in this area before we move dramatically higher or lower — and it might be quite a battle, especially with the March lows for […]

Touching the 200: Story of the summer?

I take my lumps in public here, so its not red-boarding to point out the sucessful predictions (guesses?) when they actually do occur! Thursday we briefly touched to 200 day moving average on the S & P 500, fulfilling my prophecy of May 25th that it would in fact be hit this summer. In May […]

The line in the sand, part 2

Yesterday, I suggested that traders would be better off waiting to see if the market clears S & P 1335, before loading up on bullish positions. Here’s a slightly different chart, where the line in the sand looks like it should be drawn at 1340: I’m not sure there is all that much difference between […]

A long time between tests

It’s been a long time since the S & P 500 tested the 200 day moving average, hasn’t it? Last year we spent much of the middle portion of the year (roughly March – September) underneath the 200. Since then it’s now been eight plus months without a whiff of that level. And the market […]

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