Friday Wraps - TGIF

Start of a three-day weekend and I'm glad. It was a rough week but I actually didn't do as badly as I make it all sound. I took two shots at LQDT today and both were profitable - 50 cents on one and a quarter on the other. Basically both were simple breakouts on the 15-minute charts. I also played SGP to a 6 cent loss and TTI to a break even + happy meal. The latter two I took off my "Day Trading with BOB" filter and they were the only ones that had any promise at all - a very weak output this morning and then a weak day going forward. I'm flat going into the weekend - still not ready to carry risk overnight - I'll let you know when that changes.

Of the three Amigos - GOOG had a reasonable day, Steve Balmer managed to talk MSFT into a 75 cent loss, and AAPL just twisted in the cold, cold wind - down 40 cents or so. I watch these three because these, among several others, are bell weather stocks. They let you know which way the wind is blowing and today it was just swirling around going nowhere.

That described the market as a whole,of course, but the INDU finished the day in positive territory. However, when you look at it and you don't have to look too closely, both major indices - the SPX and the COMPQ finished down - so I'm considering today to be a down day.

Small cap finished up and I think that is going to be the real story going forward for the rest of the year. I'll be publishing an update to the Marlyn's Curve over the weekend with the four indices overlaid. I've made a major change and I want to see how it works out. First major change to Marlyn's Curve in almost a decade.

I've started working with this new charting service that I read about over on Esto's site - named Quotetracker - what appeals to me is that you can program your own alerts based on your own custom criteria. That has to be worth something. And I can use my existing prophet.net data subscription to drive the beast. I'll try it out and let you know. I'd really like to program good old BOB into the engine on a 15-minute basis and see what comes out of that. I know that there are other applications out there that permit you to do these things on the minute-based charts - but this only cost me 60 bucks for a year's access and I'm already paying for the data feed through prophet. I also can get a real-time data feed from one of my brokerage accounts (free) - so I'm covered backward and forward.

I'm looking for a solid down day on Tuesday - this is afterall the week after expiration and all of the 401K money has been placed. The up/down ratio still sits in neutral but the VIX slid more than 5 points below the 10-day moving average. The INDU ATR is at 75.87 and this indicator is two days overdue:



And way way overbought. Once again we're in that position where we need to take a little pressure off the market. It has to go down to go up.

I'm calling Tuesday - down.

The magic coin is calling Tuesday ... heads - up. OK - we're starting to diverge.

Having called today a down day I get a point that makes it Marlyn 13 - 9 and 4 and the coin is 9 - 13 and 4.