Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Another huge range day on the indices

The debt ceiling story is finally over, the Senate passed it and Obama signed it. But we didn't get the effect most people apparantly were expecting (many people on Twitter expected a bounce).

After a rather small gap down, we ran up into resistance, being yesterday's close. From there on, it mostly went down. There was some basing near pre-market lows, but once that broke (half an hour before the vote) the bears were in control.
Bulls gave it three weak shots to stop the bleeding, but to no avail. The last hour downfall was very impressive, about 15 points straight down on the S&P. Indices dived between 2.2% and 2.9%.

So we closed near the lows on major volume. This was the second day in a row that we've seen a huge range on indices.Chances for a bounce are increasing, since most indices are sitting at some sort of support (plus the fact that we've seen about 7 straight down days in a row). Two questions remain, when will the bounce come, and how far up will it get us?

One can say, things have changed recently. We're sitting under the 200 day movering average on the indices, we're printing lower lows and the dips are not bought (yet). Obviously it's too late for shorts here, but a bounce for 2-3 days could bring some nice setups.

Trades
I tried a long in LULU early on, since the stock moved up on good volume, trying to break a 10-day trendline. The trendline actually proved to be resistance once more and I got stopped out on a new low of day.

A little later, the S&P made a new low and I shorted the ES-futures (E-mini S&P500) at 1272.25.
I'm still in the trade after a nice +20-point run, giving it some room here. Bought some SPY-calls at the close in case we turn here.


Edit: one more thing. Despite the huge drop on increasing volume, VIX (the 'fear'-index) didn't go that much higher. Actually, the intraday-highs of the past 2 days exceeded the high for today. This divergence with the market could point to a coming bounce.

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