After I covered all of my shorts today I was convinced that I should take tomorrow off and not press my luck. That’s because so many stocks seem oversold after all this week’s selling. I was also seeing things like the QQQQ breaking its July low, the SOX breaking to a new 5+ year low and the indices and many stocks closing under their lower Bollinger Bands. “Surely the market’s due for a bounce here”, I was thinking. But once I started looking through the charts tonight I changed my mind. I think there’s plenty of room left for even more selling. That’s because none of the major indices I track have oversold stochastic reading yet. Even worse T2108 is still above 40. So I went looking to see what hasn’t been sold yet. Small caps (IWM), financials (XLF) and homebuilders stood out. If we get more selling I’ll be looking for shorts in those areas. Almost everything else seems too prone to snap-back rallies for me to be interested.

On Monday I wrote about the compression of the Multiple Moving Averages (MMAs) on the Nasdaq. SImilar to the range expansion theory that predicts a big movement in price (but not direction). Well, I think we’ve got our move. You can see that the short-term group of MMAs has now push through the long-term group and is chasing price lower. The compression of the short-term group is no more and the long-term group will likely follow suit.

Here’s another shot of the Nasdaq chart:

The QQQQ chart shows that large cap tech has really been sucking wind of late. I’ll be watching for a rally attempt at the July intraday low but I suspect that the S&P and/or Nasdaq touching their July lows will be what triggers a serious rally attempt.

The SOX tells the same story with its new 5-year low:

The S&P seems destined for a retest of 1200.

Here are the ETFs that I’ll be watching for shorting opportunites if we get more selling in the coming days — IWM, XLF and XHB. (Others include RKH, ICF, IYR and XLY)

Trend Table

Once again the “downs” are dominating the chart.

Trend Nasdaq S&P 500 Russell 2000
Long-Term Down Down Lat(-)
Intermediate Down(-) Down(-) Up
Short-term Down Down(-) Down(-)

(+) Indicates an upward reclassification today
(-) Indicates a downward reclassification today
Lat Indicates a Lateral trend

*** I’m simply using the indices’ relations to their 200, 50 and 10-day moving averages to tell me the long, intermediate and short-term trends, respectively.