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Strategies & Market Trends : MDA - Market Direction Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jerry Olson who wrote (41450)	2/26/2000 11:34:00 AM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 99985

My trading acct has flourished like never before...my reads of these charts are better than ever...and i could care less about market noise or opinions...i have successfully tuned all that crap out... where do we go from here???? don't know?? i can't predict the future, i can only follow my indicators, and P&F charts..in fact i'm not good enough to predict even 1 days potential move...and why should I???, in the scheme of things it doesn't effect me one way or the other.. Jerry I have always loved your bullishness as it helps me keep myself from taking a negative outlook too seriously. When it comes to making money, I'm just like you, I only go by the charts. My thoughts on valuations don't make me any money and I try, like you, to distance my trading decisions from subjective thoughts on the market and opinion. Perhaps the biggest difference is that I only trade the futures actively (intraday); I take positions on index derivatives; and stocks I only take position longs when the broad market is in my favour. For some reason I go short whenever a stock suggests it, irrespective of the broad market. Things tend to fall faster, and there's been no lack of good positional shorts these last 12 months. Over the past two months I've been playing the swings in the indexes both long and short (Canada's index looks more like the Nasdaq chart in terms of strength intelligentspeculator.com but is now in a critical area itself). But I have carried no long stock positions for a while, quite content to deploy extra capital into the index proxies and trade the spoos since I've viewed this period as critical (and still do). And my focus on the futures and indicies keeps me well in touch with what's happening so I never lose any sleep over those positions. Basically it all comes down to this -- with a clear top set in the SPX some time ago, the NYA in a worse downtrend, and the Nasdaq moving sideways for 12 or so trading sessions (prior to the breakout of the wedge and Friday's reversal) -- establishing new longer term stock positions just goes contrary to my analysis. There certainly have been some excellent long plays but I just don't have the time and attention to scalp them, and it would be going contrary to my analysis to hold them as positions. I'm quite ok with that. If the bull is to continue, there will be plenty of opportunities in stocks. Not to mention having two very young children and my firm's consulting business is running flat out crazy with business, I often am away from the trading computer and just don't have the stomach to hold highly volatile individual stocks during this critical time. I'm pretty sure the next real bottom you and I and many folks here will be calling it. I'm just not about to catch a falling knife here, as there will come a time when oversold indicators, that we've all learned to use effectively to buy the dip, will stop working. I just prefer to buy when price moves up and takes me in the trade, thus proving the market's strength. As for all the commentary on the market and tech stock valuations, supposed to be just good clean fun for me, I hope. I came out of SI dormancy earlier this year only after detecting some important topping action in the SP and until the technical damage is undone, my prognosis remains negative on the entire market. Normally I don't even bother discussing anything other than the charts! I have felt a bit on edge a couple times this last few days and if any of my posts to others betrayed that, I apologize.