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Strategies & Market Trends : Stock Attack II - A Complete Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Terry Whitman who wrote (34035)	4/10/2002 3:35:27 PM
From: Square_Dealings	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52237

VIX is holding .618 retracement of the latest spike up. Could be a virtual reality rally. M.

To: Terry Whitman who wrote (34035)	4/10/2002 4:03:18 PM
From: TechTrader42	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52237

"I guess that's as close to a 'buy' signal as we're ever going to get from you, eh?" It's always a gamble, Terry. Trading stocks is speculation, plain and simple. Any traders who think otherwise are kiddin' themselves, or they've had experience with only about one trade. So my buy signals, and my short signals, are always qualified, always cautious. And it pays to use stops. It's been my experience that the more confident market prognosticators are about their signals, the less likely they are to be right. I think good analysts allow for a wide variety of possibilities. I could add a lot more qualifications about my short-term buy signals, and to begin, I'd point to the longer-term sentiment indicators. Like Don's longer-term readings, these would appear to be overbought. Longer-term waves do bear down on shorter-term ones. It's my impression that in some ways, those who tend to be bullish may believe that they're taking the optimistic approach to the market and trading. Rukeyeser said in an interview in the NYT yesterday that "in investing, as in life, 'pessimism is the losing strategy.' " There's some wisdom in this, and I appreciate it. But shorting the market is not based on a pessimistic approach to trading or the market. The market moves up and it moves down. One needn't put a value on up or down if one's timing the market and prepared to trade it in both directions. This is a TA thread, about market timing and stock picking. There are those who believe in buying and holding for the long term, based on fundamentals, but generally TA is about timing the market. Going short and going long have little to do with being "optimistic" or "pessimistic." One can short the market and be optimistic about the strategy. If I'd shorted LU when you chose to go long with it, I wouldn't have been making a pessimistic trade. I would have simply been betting that the price bars on the chart would head down (as I expected them to do). And so they did. And when I said the market sentiment indicators were overbought in the long term, and that I expected a pullback, the pullback occurred. It wasn't a value judgment on the market, and it wasn't pessimistic, and the analysis wasn't intended to undermine any long trades. It was simply a reading of some pretty basic TA indicators. There are a lot of people who desperately need to see the market go back up, so they can recoup losses. If it does go back up, it won't be because of their persuasive arguments on SI. It'll be for technical or fundamental reasons, astonishingly enough. Today it went up for technical reasons. A couple of weeks ago, it went down because of fundamental and technical reasons, despite all the howling from a permanently bullish contingent of tech investors who have little interest in timing a market that moves up and down. Their interest is in regaining losses, and in silencing traders who are capable of appreciating the simple fact that the market can move down as well as up.