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Strategies & Market Trends : CFZ E-Wiggle Workspace -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: skinowski who wrote (184)	2/26/2003 8:14:52 PM
From: At_The_Ask	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 41499

No you are right. If a person had just went short in Jan 02 and covered in july or oct that would have been perfect. Correctly trading the flat thing since july would have been good too. If I had to make one trade this year I'd probably buy right now. I guess that makes me bullish?

To: skinowski who wrote (184)	2/26/2003 11:52:38 PM
From: bcrafty	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41499

skinowski & ATA, I second those thoughts If you waited for the neighborhoods of VIX 20 to sell & hold and VIX 50 to buy & hold and just took the rest of the time off, you'd be doing great - like ATA said, sell Jan 02 (VIX 20) buy July or Oct 02 (VIX 50). But then you have these problem areas where you don't quite get to those levels, like Jan 03. With the rally in early January I thought there might be a chance that we'd get to VIX 20, but no cigar. After not reaching that mark and having that large decline I made the comment that maybe we'd trade sideways for a few months and then eventually get to VIX 20, but now it looks almost equally likely that instead we might end up getting to VIX 50 first. So these types of situations, similar to the current, are particularly difficult where the "extremes" end up not being as extreme as one would like, showing that one can't easily use sentiment as a guide to finding the optimum time to switch sides (if you trade with sentiment as a major indicator). It makes me think more and more that maybe now is a time to be flat. Another argument in that favor is this year's unimpressive volume, suggesting we just have the pros trading against the pros. That lack of significant volume might end up producing more and more whipsawing, until more and more of even the ST bulls or bears are shaken out, except for the top-notch scalpers. But even if you're trying to remain flat you have personal psychology issues, like when you're used to being in the market at all times it's hard to make yourself stay out. And it's hard to convince yourself that what you think are major opportunities and turning points are actually phantoms instead. So there are a whole other bundle of issues to deal with even if one is attempting to remain flat. Geez, whoever said that none of this would be easy sure was right, wasn't he? P.S. Sorry for the intermediate-term rambling, and I hope the people here end up being "the top-notch scalpers" I referred to.