Wraps Thursday

A good day. No 12% haircuts for me today. As I said yesterday - I don't hide - but I did make a change or two today and I recommend this to anyone who gets hit hard a couple days in a row. Drop back on the weight - only take half or quarter loads. Get the feel back. It was probably just bad luck - but ego and arrogance play a large part in what we do and if you go out swinging for the fences after a bad beat or two you are liable to get beat some more. Remember the market can dish it out a lot longer than you can take it.

So that's what I did today - I throttled back and here's how I did. PLXS +4 cents for a breakeven plus a happy meal - my bride is pleased - we eat tonight (just kidding). LQDT +1.10 - probably could have had more but was in late and out early (another part of the recovery process - a good profit - is a good profit - is a good profit). PDLI +30 cents. And KNOT +31 cents. I bought KNOT and then doubled up after it bounced off the EMA 21 on the 30-minute charts. I was expecting it to do that and put some nice coin in the register because I anticipated a recovery. All told $1.65 and I feel a lot better. And, of course, I'm flat in my account - just cash going into Friday. I was done by noon and spent some quality time with my bride. And that's how it has to be for now.

I had 9 candidates with the "day trading with BOB" filter today. 4 went down and 5 went up. One gapped up too far to be of any use and of the other four I took PDLI and PLXS. PDLI proved to be the best of the lot. Of the 15 I had yesterday 12 are now up and only 3 are down. I think this is going to be a good filter - not automatic - but a little common sense can go a long way in this business. And once we get out of earnings season it should be a good filter for picking swing trades. It is interesting how the smallest things can sometimes mean so much.

I ignored CRI even though I saw right away that it was going to gain back some of yesterday's lost blood. Sometimes I just don't want to be bothered with the garbage. It's probably foolish of me because all of the bad that could happen has happened but once burned twice shy. Maybe tomorrow.

I read this morning that Cramer was all over NTRI for low balling their announcement on January 31st then coming out with a boomer last night. He said that he's through with this bunch. That made a big impact on his legion of fan (sports stars have legions of fans - Cramer just has legion) and I see that NTRI is up 14%.

The three Amigos - MSFT, GOOG, and AAPL didn't get the message, two went down a bit and Mr. Softy made about 6 cents for his loyal supportors. Let's see 100 shares x 6 cents = happy meal? Nope. I'm not really sure what that sums up to except something negative going forward. Probably has something to do with options expiration tomorrow. BIDU took the 12% haircut today.

I notice that bubblevision is blaming Bernake today for the market not continuing the boom. He was the hero yesterday and the goat today and pretty much said the same thing. The media types always have to have something to blame it on. They just can't say its a matter of supply and demand. If they did they'd soon realize that they were an oversupply to very little demand.

I looked at the charts every once in awhile this afternoon and about the only thing I could say that could even come close to a characterization is "driftage" - the market is in "driftage". No point, no purpose, no real destination, just a large floating cloud of crap.

Of course I missed on my forecast but as I said the NewMoMo method is relatively new and I do know from my testing that it doesn't have a 1.0 correlation - just close. The ATR indicator is also "just close" and most of the time several days go by between its dipping below 80 and the INDU taking a fall. I showed that on the figure last week. So probably tomorrow.

Speaking of the NewMoMO indicator here it is for today's edition of As the Wrap Turns -


The up/down ratio is printing 48% so it's neutral again. The VIX is neutral and the ATR indicator is 77.78. So two in neutral, two showing down - I'm going with down - I don't think the market can stand another up day this week.

The magic coin says ... heads - a bull market again - well at least we differ.

Once again we both missed so the score is Marlyn 12 - 9 and 4 and the coin is 9 - 12 and 4. Still just a little better than luck.

GOOG, BIDU, YHOO

Which one for me? Should I take my small trading account and wrap it up in GOOG or BIDU or buy a bit of YHOO and distribute the rest somewhere else? What if I just bought a few shares of GOOG - would that be worth anything over time?

Questions, questions, questions. Three stocks with three different price ranges and three different stories in the popular press. To read the stories one would think that YHOO was toast and BIDU didn't stand a chance because the monster GOOG is coming to assimilate them. When you look at the following chart you get a different story.



When the returns are normalized and analyzed together on Marlyn's amazing Curve we see that sometimes GOOG leads, sometimes BIDU leads and most of the time YHOO holds its own. One thing that I did notice however is this -



YHOO often leads BIDU on the turns - both up and down. I don't know if you could use that factoid to inform your investments in BIDU - i.e. to beat the crowd - but it might not be a bad idea for you to start watching YHOO in this regard.

As always this is just an idea and ideas are dime a dozen. You must do your own analysis and be comfortable with your own approach.

Watch Out GOOG - Wiki's Coming

A lot of the content I produce for this Blog is not readily available to the general public because I use my own theories, tools, and methods to produce them. Of course almost all of what I do is derivative - and who doesn't borrow - you see a good idea and then you start tweaking it and picking at it and before you know it you've integrated that idea into something that you can call your own. You hardly know any more where what you borrowed began and where what you brought ends. And that's the way it should be - originality is the key.

In other words - if I wanted to know what some index did today I'd go to bubblevision and let some bobblehead tell me. Then they will tell me some BS for why it was that way. On this site we all know why the market goes up and why it goes down and it really doesn't have much to do with what GE or the proprietors of 8000 funds think. It is simply this - if there is something worth buying it will be bought and if not it will be sold. I know that doesn't sound sexy and romantic like "Santa Claus Rally" but which one do you think makes more sense? You do believe in Santa Claus don't you?

If I wanted to know what the market is going to do tomorrow I'd come here because here is the only place with the cockamamie up/down ratio and new 20 day highs - new 20 day lows and last hour candlesticks and blah blah blah that has any original thinking. Besides, as you know, the magic coin is better than Cramer and millions of people listen to him.

Folks there is nothing wrong with original thinking.

The guy that founded Wikipedia realized a dream and it probably wasn't his but a dream of researchers all over the world. A quick, mostly accurate place to begin a quest. And, yes, I know sometimes the articles, especially the bio's are pretty bad and somewhat inaccurate but there is an awful lot of really good stuff in there. I have discovered that if I want to know anything about just about anything instead of going to Google I go to Wikipedia. Instead of getting 11 million results that I'm not going to use I usually get exactly what I was looking for. I've also heard, anecdotally, that the rest of the world is catching on to this too.

For instance I just wanted to remember the formula for the relative strength indicator(RSI). I know I have it in about three books in my bookcase, and probably in four or five folders on my hard drive - but I simply typed "RSI" in Wikipedia's search box and then selected from the dozen or so "RSI" they have listed. Within 30 seconds I had my solution.

Now I've heard that the Wikipedia folks are going to join with Amazon to build a search engine. My recommendation - for those of you invested in GOOG or BIDU - take the profits and run. Wikipedia is an original idea born of the Internet for the Internet - within a couple of years they will overwhelm the search space and that is one IPO I want to get in on.

UPDATE: No sooner do I get it posted than TradingGoddess (a GOOG holder) comes along and sends me to a post containing the same old same old about Wikipedia - and that - folks - is the whole point - not even the criticism is original. As I said - there is nothing wrong with originality - why at one time or another even GOOG was original.