Morning guys, nothing much to trade here.
Just been looking at the Dow pre open ramp up, would you believe its the same as yesterdays and the day before. A one minute chart shows it clearly.
Imagine that its 4 am in New york and 1am on the west coast and the prices are going up at a uniform rate the same as they did the last 2 days. #NotRigged. :whistling
8 points off 16,600 yesterday, how are those shorts feeling right now.
See you at 1.30.
It is simple, Wall St has been for a long time and still is on a respirator. In that Wall Street is not alone, but for trading purposes it is the largest and most influential.
In last April Wall Street has absorbed only $55bn of declared "assistance",not that long ago it was $85bn every month. So Wall St has adjusted to such "unfairness" and "injustice" grabbing what is on offer anyway. Hunk Paulson the Secretary of the Treasury (2006 - 2009) has been recorded saying that he is seek on account of seeing the "misuse" of this "assistance", which has benefited only the sharks on Wall Street rather than assisting the US economy and millions of hard pushed Americans. These trillions are not illegal, for they were and continue to be legally printed, but they are illegitimate, in a way that they have not been generated by the normal economic activity, which "surprisingly" they do not support either.
What this have to do with trading? One might ask.
The flow of the market and the emotions of the crowd have been undermined.
There is more institutional and big traders by participation percent, but the individual "investors pool" has shrank drastically, with about only 50% of American individuals participation, most often in relation to 401k , as there is nothing else possible to do with it, apart of either “invest it” or let the inflation take care of these savings. Many have chosen the inflation path. This pool of small private investors were and are very important, for start they think they are “investors” for they are deluded that they “invest” for their retirement. In effect they have become liquidity providers a very important market activity, but after seeing their pools of money saved for retirement evaporate rather fast, it is hardly surprising that they have reached some conclusions. So now the pool of small fish is getting much smaller and less active, the sharks are staring to feed on one another a well illustrated reality by Michael Lewis in his last book “Flash boys”, the book is about High Frequency Traders, or trading firms using algorithms and sophisticated programs and tactics to gain advantage on other institutions not to mention the “dark pools” of large investment banks, where a large percentage of trades is rooted through, and ended up being fronted by the institutions which should be looking after the best interests of their customers, what a joke, (this book is highly recommended, though it is only dealing with one aspect of this ongoing rip-off activity).
All of this has made a more natural market flow together with market rhythm and its harmonic ratios to be undermined, and therefore that much more difficult to trade if one has been used to apply fibs, EW or other cycles or approaches. There is much more unexpected behaviour and markets achieve more extreme zones more frequently, or at times just nothing makes scene in a way it used to do lets say 10 years ago.
Markets change and this time the QE is one of the most influential agent for this change, well aided by other activities practised by the big financial institutions. Interestingly the volume on forex pairs has dried compared to what it was a year ago, it resembles scenario of long ago when indices were much more active than currency pairs. Over the last few months large banks curtailed or closed their forex trading departments, so this should not be that surprising either.
I still use a number of approaches like EW, Fibs and Delta cycles with a few MAs and a couple of indicators, but it is a very much “what works now” approach. I also trade momentum on intra day TF. So there are a number of strategies that I use atm, but always being very careful to observe a well positioned SL and Trailing Stop when in profit.
One should never expect markets to behave in a rational way using well discerned patterns of its behaviour, if it was so there would be no market at all to trade, and this sentence probably says it all! However, today being a very “voluminous trading day” gave me a bit of time to inflict this reading on you, sorry if all of this is obvious and boring.
Wishing you all a nice day!
2be