SPEAK OF THE DEVIL

All of us should thank the good lord for the blessing he had given us to be free of the PPT for so long. They re-appeared yesterday out of the blue in the last hour. These are pretty easy to spot and obvious even for those who do not understand what they do. I will get to that in a moment. The above picture is just a screen shot of the stock shorts I have on. I have covered the sizes because I do not want people getting the wrong impression. I do throw out dollar amounts in trades here from time to time, just to give people a general sense of the size I trade. However, bragging about money is obnoxious and I will not engage in that. In general I trade anywhere from 300 to 1000 shares at a time in stocks, and like to put several of them on at once, spreading my risk out a bit.

One trade that was a complete home run was TIF. If you click on the chart it should enlarge and you can see that I exited that trade yesterday with the huge windfall. I was a bit lucky in that I got out at 62.01 very close to the low. Whenever I see a large expansion bar like that I take profits or at least partial amounts out. In this case due to the choppy nature of the indexes, I decided to take the full position off. The others I will use trailing stops and targets and see what happens. I am still unsure at this point if we are going to get the last thrust down before the rally that I have been looking for, but I want to be positioned to make some money if it takes place.

Here we have a Picasso painted by the PPT yesterday. We were on the verge of falling off a cliff yesterday and low and behold out of the blue in the last hour a "surprise" rally. When you see this type of thing you can rest assured, this was the PPT at work. They chose a spot to make a stand, and chose wisely. I don't think too many people saw a big buy program coming when this happened. It fizzled overnight, so we will have to see how determined they are today to prop it up again. I sure wish they would not do this, but it is what it is, so there is nothing any of us can do about it.

I really think completely free markets without government manipulation work better in the long run, but obviously "they" do not agree. The trend is still down, so when that is the case you, have to be prepared for erratic bounces due to these folks doing this. New readers please read up on the Internet about the PPT I am not going to keep explaining this in here other than just pointing out when I think they have done something.

Here we have one of the Bond Market charts. You can see my COT indicator here has reached the buy zone, and also how well that has timed recent rallies in this market. What I am looking for here is a rally, that sets up a right shoulder sell signal. Perhaps we will just take off again, but my plan is to look for a sell after this bounce here takes place. For now it appears to be a buy, we don't know if it will become a legitimate short yet. I have been short here recently but covered that trade for some daniero thinking we were going to bounce and I would get another entry.

In summary, I am short the indexes and some individual stocks looking for a decline. I have lighter than normal positions due to how choppy things have been. I am comfortable with that regardless of what happens, this market has been very tricky over the last month and a half. The Hogs trade I mentioned the other day I did take and it became a stop out loss immediately on that big range day. Oops I thought when you write about trading you never admit to a loss? Silly me!

Good Trading