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Strategies & Market Trends : Waiting for the big Kahuna -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James F. Hopkins who wrote (21419)	7/9/1998 1:30:00 PM
From: Daniel Ray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 94695

Hello Kahunans, First off, please excuse my 'trial member' status . . . I have read many off your posts here over the past year, and use this thread as a reminder (as if I needed one) about the exceeding difficulty of predicting the movements of the financial markets. To those of you who are able to profit from the swings, my hat is off: it is much more difficult than it seems to rake dollars off the Wall Street pile. In retrospect everything is easy to understand, hence the allure of Elliot Waves and TA . . . but when you own a pile of highly leveraged paper that may become worthless in a few days/hours/minutes . . . well, it's a whole different ball game. I learned my lesson trading OEX puts and calls in 88-89-90 . . . how often I was right . . . but not at precisely the right time . . . and how very painful were my losses. So, to the point . . . I seem to recall a certain sentiment on this threat about a major movement in the SPX etc., etc. leading up to July expiration. What is the general consensus here as to the likelihood of this, now that the date draws nigh? Crash up? Crash down? Fizzle out? My own gut feeling is that July expiration may be unusually quiet, with the averages consolidating near their present levels. In a related vein, I wonder about the implications of the widespread belief that the markets will suffer a major correction in the Fall. If we make marginal new highs in the next few weeks and then trade sideways in August and September, the stage would be set for yet another October meltdown. But isn't this 'calendrical phenomenon' so widely observed at this point as to induce many speculators into buying puts and going short, therefore building support under the market and preventing the collapse? Indeed, is it not in this way that history tends, not to repeat, but rather to echo itself? By definition these _major_ moves happen when almost no one expects them, when the put/call ratio has sunk so far below a mean value that most speculators no longer credit its viability as a predictive indicator. In short, does not the fact that everyone seems to expect a crash in October make an October crash very unlikely? I hope not to have taken too much bandwidth with my observations, and look forward to any comments they may elicit. Best wishes and many windfalls! d.r.