Wrapping Monday

Days like today are two hours too long. The market closed around 1:30 and everybody went home. After that it was the standard afternoon degradation in price of just about everything including the indices.

I took positions in SYMC (still holding) and VRSN this morning right after the bell based on their 2-hour charts from last Friday. They both looked as if they were going somewhere. VRSN did – it went right up to 25.84 and collapsed back to where I bought it. I’m out even less round trip commissions. SYMC stayed profitable all day but if I sold it now it would only cover its and VRSN’s commissions plus a bacon cheeseburger and that would mean that I wasted my day when I could have been doing something better or at least different. I think it will go up tomorrow – if the market goes up. At least I expect it to jump in the first 15 minutes or so and maybe I’ll be able to get something out of it then. I hate this time of year – nobody knows what to do. They’re afraid to sell and wreck their year end statistics or maybe get a tax hit and they are afraid to buy – although the market, to the best of my knowledge, has never crashed in December.

Anyway there is always tomorrow and whether the sun comes up or not (I’m betting it does any one want to fade me?) we are going to have a stock market to ridicule and maybe even trade a bit. What’s the forecast?

The up/down ratio sits at 61% (not good) the new 20 day highs doubled up to 1074 (not good) and the new 20 day lows halved to 128 (not good). The VIX is back to neutral and the DIA and SPY both finished with little white spinners in the final hour, the Q’s finished strong red, IWM finished strong white (watch out for the small cap rally through December more on this later I think) and GS finished white. Wow – yet another one-day rally – be still my beating heart. This is the reason why I’m kind of just watching even though I took a couple of trades today. I’ll probably sit out tomorrow if I can get SYMC profitable.

Meanwhile the magic coin seems to have lost its mojo. It is now 33 and 24 having missed today and if it doesn’t watch out it could soon be 50 – 50 and be as good as Cramer (wonder if they’ll give it a TV show?). But for tomorrow --- tails – bear coming – keep calling ‘em coin and eventually you’ll get one right.