ETF Prophet

Half way through the last day of the quarter, the morning recovery has stalled at the rising Volume Weighted Average Price and internals, while still net positive, are also headed sideways. In particular, the NASDAQ 100 had difficulty breaking past its first level of resistance even as the Financials also put in a contemporaneous double [...]

Despite yesterday’s distinctly negative performance, there were a few intraday trading setups using the VIX that yielded a few dimes and a quarter into the close. On the 2 minute Qs chart above I’ve tracked the VIX trend with white heavy lines and the Qs price trend with orange lines. Just for comparison I’ve added [...]

More on the cult of equities and questioning the prevailing received wisdom that stocks are the best investment: Is it time to buy corporate bonds over equities? Historically equities are seen as an inflation hedge, but the jury is out on this. Especially when you can buy index linked bonds that guarantee that they will [...]

Much has been written about the value of tracking price versus long-term moving averages. Research has shown that semi-active portfolio management using more difficult “to game” secular trends is helpful in reducing draw-downs and volatility while also prospectively enhancing returns and assisting in the identification of the strongest performing indices for rotational purposes. As promised [...]

Friday’s narrow range and slight sell picked up strong momentum in the Sunday futures on the GM CEO news leading into today’s major gap down. And yet this really only puts us down a small fraction into the recent rebound range. While Cumulative Tick still looks very weak, (although there has been a series of [...]

Here’s the latest on the Qs Pivot Bands and Pivot Impulse indicator. It’s just another way of looking at the data fields based on the value of the weekly pivots and the weekly change in the R2-S2 range. So far it’s been a valuable tool for keeping us on the right side of Qs momentum [...]

Markets: Chosing a decent long term investment is a bit of an ugly contest at the moment. If planning for the long term, it may pay to question the cult of equities. The conventional wisdom is that stocks outperform any other asset class in the long run – while this may be true in the [...]

(Click Image to Enlarge/ Glossary) Several economic data points suggesting a slowing in the pace of our nation’s economic decline, together with more details on the TALF Program, provided the fuel for another broad-based advance that left the markets up for the third week in a row and uniformly positive on the month (NASDAQ – [...]

It was a wild week that tested my nerves, patience and emotional control. It was all about how to hedge PCLN after I added on the dip. Unfortunately, I chose a super strong, straight-up, no pull back whatsoever BMS and kept averaging up till the gap down today, which also refused to break even 1 [...]

Not a lot of directional movement today. Notably, however, the slope of the Cumulative Tick line has taken a turn for the worse (third pane, dotted “colorful” line along side tick — trying to repair just as I hit ‘publish post’). The AD is also headed south. Note how yesterday’s highs took us nearly all [...]

Coming into the open today my little ETF basket are all hugging the upper LR75 channel band. I’ve stepped back from the typical LR30 perspective as that channel got a good-bye kiss 10 days ago from the entire basket.While the action over that time frame has produced 45 degree price ascents in the basket, if [...]

As part of creating more discipline for myself in terms of posting, I’m going to steal an idea from Headlinecharts and start making specific days of the week the time when I do repeated postings. So, I’ve decided that Thursdays are for Relative Strength. I’m posting two views of Relative Strength – one using my [...]

Cumulative new highs subtracted by new lows has been signaling the green light to start going short again. Since July 2007, or the peak before the ’07 top, this indicator has not generated even 1  consecutive multi-day  ”rally” in both the Nasdaq nor NYSE issues. The pattern looks like multiple waterfalls with no bottom in [...]

SPX 820 has proven to be a strong magnet for this market and yesterday’s late-day recovery smacked of “buying the dip” mentality from scared money managers still holding cash buying at obvious support. However, that very same level has also proven fairly stiff resistance thus far. That said, certainly the more times we test it, [...]

Here’s yesterday’s VIX action with GE, one of my ETF trading outliers. The afternoon VIX cross at 13:25 was a great tell that price was about to fade and the flattening and reversal of the VIX starting at 15:00 was a good tell that a bounce was about to ensue.In the lower technical panel of [...]

We have reached the fib retracement in the SPY at 82.7 and new lows are extremely low, forming consecutively high red bars in the histogram of my SPX divided by NYSE new lows indicator. How much more pump is there before some decent retracement to the mid 75-76 range in the SPY? it’s getting ridiculous [...]

Another strong morning on the “slowing in the economic decline” thesis. Just now we are testing a potentially important intraday level on the SPY, as indicated by the bold orange line derived from yesterday’s price wavelet peaks and troughs. Internals are net positive, but I’ll be trading carefully here — this raging bull has taken [...]

Contrary to the contention I made several weeks ago that the VIX was only useful for trading on daily bars, here are 2 examples of using the VIX/price cross on intraday bars to forecast short term momentum. The VIX (close) is displayed as a continuous white line on both charts.Above is Monday’s action on 5 [...]