Keep on pushing !!!!

Yesterday
Another day of crazy market moves. We stayed in a fairly narrow range off the open and kept on testing both lower and upper boundaries until we broke out of the range late afternoon. So what caused this rally? Yet another improved economic indicator (no comment yet again).

So what happened? It seems AMEX came out saying we have less credit card delinquencies then the month before. Yay !!! the recession is over, the bottom is in, a hand full of people started to actually pay for their bills, instead of spending it on a new toy, big screen TV or anything related to consumer spending (hint hint) - this is the sign we have all been waiting for. Forget about the quadrillion that is somewhere there on the side in some uncontrolled market, forget about cooked up books and unethical accounting reports, forget about housing, debt, leverage or the fact that no one can get any money from banks to innovate or grow. People are paying their bills a bit more now, thats worth at least 2% more on the market. Big price move, NO volume. Does not get more bearish then this.

We did top out at 852 and yet again I did not short even with such a bearish move.

Today
JPM earnings today at 8:00. I may make a move pre-market here around 8:00 when the fireworks will start. What do I expect for JPM earnings wise? Have to admit I am not so confident on a call here. I could go either way and we will know at 8:00 what direction we will take.

In terms of direction for the day, I will post more information once we see the earnigns report. My perfect trade plan of course would be to re-attempt yesterdays top and hit the 856. Here is where it will get interesting, it is very possible that we keep on pushing further up the range to get back to the 864 and possibly hit the first 871. If we are to see a trend up here I will scale in with hedge at the 852 as I expect it to top out here for the short term at least.

The other interesting observation is the lack of volatility we are seeing this week, usually during option expiration week we have much stronger moves and we have not yet seen those. This could lead to quite a bit of volatility today and tomorrow so be careful and keep your stops tight on day trades.

Keep in mind, the top yesterday may have been the top of the new channel I had described in yesterdays review. Today we will know for sure what pattern we will have to trade with, either uptrend channel (very weak at this point), the new downtrend channel (medium probability), or still within the wedge formation (highest probability).

Trade Review
(new section that reviews twitter trades in more detail, may actually add graphs going forward so we can analyse what could have been improved - every trade can always be improved, there is no perfect trade)

I did a few trades yesterday, long SSO in the morning as posted in twitter, which worked out. It had a typical 3 wave pattern with me closing out on top of the waves (again as posted on twitter and described in yesterdays comments).

I tried shorting mid day, first SDS got stopped out, I tried again and got stopped again. The second trade would have been in the money if I had managed entries and stops better. As you remember I had stated via twitter that if I did not see a sell off within 5 minutes I would close my position. The sell off never came and I had widened my stop after I saw the bigger jump on the 1 min as I wanted to protect myself from whipsaw action. As a result I had to take a much larger loss then I wanted right at the top. I went against my own recommendation. Bad trade management on my part.

1 winner, 2 loosers. Whenever I have a loosing trade strategy, the next strategy I take I generally use more money, not a lot but generally 50% more then previous position. Some may say its a mistake, I look at it from a perspective of wrong once, chances of being wrong again are less on second try, if and only if you trade a different pattern/strategy. Well it was the same pattern I tried and failed again. Managed to close the day up but not by much due to large losses on the second SDS trade.