Showing posts with label GDX. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GDX. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Divergence between indices and overhead resistance, what now?

What a nice market rally half an hour into the session. It brought the S&P right under 1220 were it touched several times. There we stayed rangebound until an hour and a half before the close. That's where the bears took over, taking back all of the gains of the day. This creates several bearish candlepatterns on the major indices; inverted hammers on the Dow and S&P, an engulfing candle on the Russell2000 and a dark cloud cover on the Nasdaq.
Moreover, Dow and S&P are sitting close under resistance of their 50-day moving averages. Nasdaq is sitting above some major moving averages, but at the top it's trading range (see depicted chart of QQQ below).

Charts of DIA and QQQ hereunder, both have quite a bearish look.




Gold and oil were up +1%, silver only up just over breakeven.

The focus tomorrow will be on the FOMC-meeting. Interesting to see what will be said and how the market will react to that.

Trades
I closed my GLD- & GDX-calls for a nice gain ($237 per pair traded).
I also went short ES-futures today, 1207.50 on average. Taking a prudent stance for now by hedging the position with SPY-longs. I'll peel of the SPY's on further market-weakness. Something new I want to try, see if this works out or not.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Going higher on lower volume

Today was almost a exact copy of yesterday. Choppy opening and then lower, followed by a trend higher albeit at a slower pace than the previous day. Today tech and small caps were actually lagging the Dow and S&P and they also printed possible hanging men (hammer-like candle after a couple of updays). That may indicate the end of this rally is near.

The rally came after the news that central banks would bring liquidity-providing operations to the markets (see article here). The economic data coming out before and just after the open, was not to bad. The focus was mainly on the jobs data and the Philly Fed number. Both were not meeting expectations, but stocks shrugged off the bad news.



5m-chart of the last 2 days in SPY, you can see momentum is waning a bit.



The next charts are DIA and QQQ. You can see QQQ (Nasdaq based ETF) clearly leading and breaking out today, but it's still in it's trading range.




Trades
I got stopped out of BAL (just above breakeven) and SGG (small profit). The only trade I have left, is an options play on the divergence between GLD (gold ETF) and GDX (goldminers ETF). I entered the trade on 08/23 on the divergence between gold and the goldminers. The goldminers were lagging gold action, so I wrote GLD-calls and bought GDX-calls (both March '12 calls). It's working great so far, already sold half the position and keeping the other half.