Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Monday Foolery

I mentioned in the Market Rewind chat room yesterday that I found Monday's to be the hardest day of the week to trade, and the above chart displays a couple reasons why.
After sitting in front of several monitors for a decade watching the Qs and the IWM fluctuation on 5 minute bars, there are a few patterns that I have come to expect. Keeping in mind my cautionary Bucket List from a couple weeks ago, still, there are price setups that I have come to intuitively recognize as high probability trades. I leave the precise quantification to Rob Hanna and Jeff Pietsch, but when the Qs get 35 to 50% away from a pivot point, the odds are EXTREMELY high that the next pivot, either up or down will get touched. This is especially true if the NYAD is trending in the direction of the likely pivot target.
Those 2 conditions today defined by big orange Xs therefore reflect some surprises on my part.
In the first instance around 9:50, I was lying in wait for the Qs to drop to S1 as the NYAD was leading the way down. Instead, the Qs showed a hairy bottom pattern, rallied back to PP and then plunged down to S1.
In the second case, around 15:45, with the the market rocketing upwards and the NYAD in a 60 degree upslope, it looked like it was going to be another bullish blowout close with the Qs kissing R1. Alas, this proved not be the case, as the entire market and the NYAD rolled over to the downside.
Nonetheless, I was still able to pull off a couple VXN/Qs trades to help pay the piper and I learned, once again, to be wary of Mondays.

No comments: