-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
February 2007 Archives
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
-
(tags: stocks)
-
Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
-
Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
-
You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
-
Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
-
What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
-
The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)
The indices recouped a small portion of yesterday's losses in a second day of very high volume trading. This morning I mentioned that the indices were stretched so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands. That's a sign of a lot of weakness and an oversold condition -- both conditions could continue longer than bulls would like. I'm hard pressed to be an aggressive (short) seller on things that are below their lower bands. But one they bounce back to declining bands there's potential for a walk down those bands. I'll be watching those bands closely for potential entry points over the coming days.
The S&P 500 bounced just over half a percent to close right at resistance. Note that it stalled right at the lower Bollinger Band today:
The Nasdaq probed the bottom of the trading range it started back in November and bounced.
Continue reading Feb. 28, 2007 Recap: Dead Cat Bounce?.
Briefing.com just posted a note about how the market feels this morning:
Floor Talk: Feel of the marketProbably the best word to describe this morning's opening rebound was "tentative." For months now it seems that everyone had expected the market to correct, only for it to keep marching higher; however, while yesterday's sell-off wasn't completely out of the blue -- especially given Monday's ominous action -- yesterday's intraday gap down in the Dow was certainly a surprise. This morning, although we saw an initial gap up in many names, there doesn't appear to be a surplus of eager buyers out there, while those looking to fade the gap up are feeling some hesitation due to the near-term oversold nature of the market following yesterday's ~3.5% drop in the indexes (which followed 4 consecutive down days)... In short, it seems that we got a decisive shift in sentiment yesterday that now favors a more cautious stance, although despite the magnitude of the sell-off yesterday we really didn't feel a sense of panic -- especially once participants realized the Dow's intraday gap down was due to a computer glitch. Perhaps the best way to sum up the approach of many traders this morning could be "wait and see" or "discretion is the better part of valor."
Sounds about right and jibes with what I wrote this morning. I'm in no rush to get long. Buyers have picked up the pace over the last 15 minutes or so but for now I'm just looking at this little move higher as some nice upticks for the bears to reload into.
So now what after the big drop yesterday. Doc Brett did his usual statistical thing to show what typically happens after a high momentum decline. His conclusion is that "we tend to see follow through to the downside over the short term." I certainly won't argue with that. Given how high margin debt levels had gotten I'm sure there are a lot of folks getting margin calls today. But here's what's on my mind...
Given that the indices are so far beneath their lower Bollinger Bands you'd have to be pretty bearish, or forced, to sell right here. I think we can expect the indices to meet those lower bands over the coming days. That may set up some better entries for shorting, if that's your thing. If I was looking for a buyable bounce, I'd want to see some reversal candlesticks -- ideally some hammers. So that means that we'd need to sell off hard intraday and then rally back to close near the highs. That's the kind of action that flushes out the sellers. Until I see something like that I'm really not interested in being long. Here's the S&P chart showing where it is in relation to the Bollinger Bands:
As for intraday action. Even with today's gap up my intraday moving averages on a 30-minute chart are still showing a strong downtrend. We could easily retrace up to either average but until those averages cross, I'm biased toward shorts.
Bottom line is until I see a flush-out type of move I'd rather be on the hunt for shorts.
Don't forget that Bernanke is speaking at 10:00...
On Today's Calendar:
- 9:45 -- Chicago PMI
- 10:00 -- New Home Sales
- 10:30 -- Crude Inventories
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 28, 2007.
We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people's attention yesterday. But I have another stat -- this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I'll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:
As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my daily traffic to a record high (I hear I'm not the only one Barry, also got a huge spike in traffic) (Edit: Barry has now made a post about his traffic spike and his thoughts on what this means for blogs & the mainstream media.):
If this selling keeps up I have no doubt that I'll be able to turn to my old trusty "this market sucks" indicator to call a bottom. :-)
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(tags: stocks)
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Because of faster growth rates, other countries' steadiest stocks, such as Samsung Electronics, might be better investments than the most solid choices in the U.S.(tags: stocks)
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Today's rout wiped out $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year as 249 of the key index's 300 shares plunged by the 10 percent limit.
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You knew it had to happen eventually. Greenspan could not just fade into retirement quietly. He just had to remind us of the good old daze (days) when he would proclaim some obtuse economic relationships, and the market would choose to over-react to its m
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Bill has some good questions for TheMoneyBlogs, which is back in recruitment mode.
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What’s the word on Barr (BRL)? Lindsay finds out how to lock it down without wrapping it up.
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The disparity between upside volume and downside volume on the New York Stock Exchange is so staggering today that it warrants comparisons to other days where volume was drastically skewed to the downside.(tags: stocks)
-
that's one very red heat map!(tags: stocks)
-
Why stocks are likely to move lower over next 6 months(tags: stocks)
-
In short, big down days have tended to represent panic and, even when they've occurred in relatively strong markets, they have tended to occur nearer to market bottoms than tops.(tags: stocks)
-
it looks like the worst intraday “tone†since July 2002.
Just an absolute crushing today. The greater than 3% selloff was on huge volume which caused all kinds of technical glitches at the NYSE. I'm hearing that many traders still have orders stuck in the system as of 5:30. That can't be good for confidence in the market -- which reminds me that I need to keep an eye on NYX for a shortable bounce.
The selling was broad-based today -- 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined. The view on the StockCharts.com market summary page is amazing. Every major market, major index, sector ETF, Industry Average and International index was down. Here's are the industry averages:
I've said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There's a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today. Yesterday I mentioned the Dow broke its summer 2006 trendline. The Russell 2000, S&P 500 and Nasdaq broke their 2006 trendlines today on big volume. The index charts are below:
Continue reading Feb. 27, 2007 Stock Market Recap.
There's a lot of chatter on CNBC about some allegedly bad data on the NYSE this afternoon. John Thain, the head of the NYSE was on the floor checking on things after the Dow hit a 200 point air pocket around 3 PM. Here's the chart with 15 minute bars:
And the chart with 1 minute bars showing a drop of more than 200 points in 3 minutes:
I'll post more if I hear more details about what happened. Certainly part of the issue is that the NYSE had record volume today...
P.S. There's an interesting read on the WSJ's MarketBeat blog about the extreme downside vs. upside volume today.
P.P.S. I've never heard booing from the NYSE floor! They were booing their heads off at the closing bell just now.
P.P.P.S Reports of "stuck" stock prices on the NYSE. Some stocks are *frozen* right now.
P.P.P.P.S. Here's a note on the 3:00 Dow drop from the WSJ blog:
Traders remain flummoxed by the sudden plunge in major averages at 3 p.m. Rumors persist among traders that some sort of technology bottleneck was responsible. Others surmised that the trading collars placed on by the NYSE had been removed, but the NYSE’s guidelines would suggest this shouldn’t have happened (the collars are put on when the New York Stock Exchange Composite Index falls 180 points, and would be removed if the index moves back to within 90 days of the previous day’s close, but the index is down more than 300 points). An NYSE spokeswoman said she didn’t believe the collars had been taken off, and she would not comment on technology-related issues.“I’ve never seen such an instantaneous gap downward,†says Anthony Conroy, head trader at BNY Brokerage. “Initially nobody really believed the market was down 500 points — I thought it was a glitch or system error.â€
P.P.P.P.P.S. And the explanation for the drop:
The sudden, sharp decline by the Dow Jones Industrial Average shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern time today was triggered by a tabulation delay by Dow Jones data systems, which calculates the average. There was a temporary lag in calculation of the 30 large-stock average due to a surge in order flows as the market continued to tumble in afternoon trading, much like a clogged pipe. Just before 3 p.m., Dow Jones Indexes switched over to a backup system to calculate the average, which nearly instantly registered the huge move.The glitch wasn’t the cause of the decline, but it did cause the drop to register far more quickly than it otherwise would have...
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Here's the Dow plunge as it happened in real time on CNBC today:
The market's being dragged down by the big drop in the Shanghai index. That index has gone parapbolic and even today's 9% drop looks like just a hiccup. There are a few Chinese names I'll be watching. BIDU looked like it was setting up for a short yesterday. I also want to see how all these recent solar IPOs, like CSIQ, SOLF, JASO & TSL hold up.
As for our indices, the Dow should open around the February lows and the S&P is blasting through its July trendline. QQQQ has now wiped out all of it's late February breakout and is back into that multi-month trading range.
On Today's Calendar:
- 10:00 -- Consumer Confidence
- 10:00 -- Existing Home Sales
More Calendars: U.S. Earnings | Conf. Calls | Surprises | IPO | Economic
Potential swing trades:
Continue reading Watchlist for February 27, 2007.
-
a blog to help newer and novice traders - as well as some professionals - overcome fears, hesitations, and anxieties concerning trading.(tags: trading Psychology)
-
(tags: trading)
-
Says Howard: "International Game technology is one of Wall Street’s greatest stocks…EVER!. It is the ‘Intel Inside’ of casinos"
-
Monday February 26th – Wednesday February 28th, you’ll be able to access the entire site – FREE. Registration is not required, just come to the site and start viewing the research reports.
-
"there is little disagreement that economic forecasting was not his forté. We have noted in the past numerous examples of his lack of forecasting acumen."
-
I just watched this DVD over the weekend. Gold bugs & perma-bears and those who hate paying income taxes (everybody?) will especially like it.
-
There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.†(via LifeSeeds)(tags: lawofattraction for_TM)
-
the top 100 finance blogs sorted by Sunday, February 25th’s Alexa Rank (the first list) and Technorati Rank (the second list).
-
With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device.
-
In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have.
-
"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.(tags: stocks)
-
The Shanghai market's correction wiped out $100 billion in value, but investors should have seen it coming.
-
those private holdings are about as illiquid as can be - no selling into today's latest market panic. But you can bet they are just a tad nervous about the timing of their voracious appetites.
-
First off, computer errors didn't cause the sell off -- they only delayed the reporting of the trades. If anything, these delays made the sell off look more orderly than it really was.
-
In sum, when we have large declines on downside momentum that is extremely broad--as we had Tuesday--we tend to see followthrough to the downside over the short term.(tags: stocks)
-
the single worst day for the Nasdaq was on the day of the crash: October 19, 1987. The Nasdaq fell 11.35% that day. (The Dow, of course, fell 22% that day.)(tags: stocks)
-
Oh, boo hoo, people! You think this is crash? Please, this ain’t no crash. We’ve become so used to no volatility, we forgot what a normal market acts like...(tags: stocks)
-
What do four really rich dudes do after the Dow takes a dip? Blackberry Shoot-Out!
-
It’s not just China people, announced one blog half way though Tuesday’s global markets’ nosebleed. “It’s not China, it’s the economy (stupid!)â€, wrote Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.(tags: stocks)
-
D'oh! It's hard out here for a bear...(tags: stocks hedgefunds)
-
What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.
-
Stockpickr scours the Internet every minute all day long, reading automatically the top 200 blogs we've fed it, and automatically indexes relevant blog posts for every portfolio and stock page on the site.
-
Below we calculate how the intraday price chart should have looked based on the actual price changes of the Dow's 30 components. As the chart shows, the calculations began to go awry a little after 1:30 pm and continued until the computers finally caught(tags: stocks)
-
One of the great features of a conspiracy theory is that it can explain anything, however convoluted.
-
Tuesday's stock selloff took a toll on some of the nation's online brokerages, with many slowing to a crawl or presenting investors with error messages when they tried to make trades.
-
Second Curve Capital, a $500 million hedge-fund firm run by Tiger Management alumnus and former top bank analyst Thomas Brown, has had a tough start to 2007 partly because of trouble in the subprime-lending sector.
-
savvy futures traders that saw the divergence could have positioned themselves to profit from the inevitable meltdown in the spot market, and the subsequent run-up after the futures rallied ahead of the spot market. AND HAD ABOUT TWO HOURS TO DO IT.(tags: trading)
-
Yesterday’s steep stock market plunge of 416 points sent a warning of how vulnerable the market structure is to systems glitches and data backlogs when there are unexpected volume surges and rapid sell-offs in an electronic trading environment.(tags: stocks)