My Kind of Day

Slow and pointless. Good thing I have an appointment this afternoon - I'd hate to think I got out of bed for this. Isn't it interesting that the Q's are sliding sideways just like the Yen did all night? Well I find it interesting even if you don't.

I picked up some NFI and dumped TRA, CBK and DLX. TRA because it was going nowhere and I didn't want to have to wait another two weeks while it climbed back up 40 cents besides its chart was starting to look wrecked. DLX because it just opened and while everything else went up it didn't and I hate stocks like that - I want them to move - up down I don't care just move. Sitting around is for old people. And CBK because I just didn't really have my heart in that stock and as it turned out I managed to sell it at the high of the day. I made car fare off TRA and a happy meal off DLX and broke even (including commissions) on CBK so that's OK - just a waste of time and opportunity.

I've been watching NFI for two weeks and every time I say I'll buy this on its next dip it doesn't so I decided to put in a small position to entice it to dip so I could fill up later. If not today maybe tomorrow. Right now it keeps hitting R2 and I keep waiting for it to go back to R1 so I can get some more.

I'm watching STD and if I ever had to pick a symbol for a stock trust me - that ain't it - but I make take a small position at COB today. We'll see.

Currently I'm holding RHT, AKS, GGB and NFI. All are profitable and I will probably add to all of them before the end of the week.

Thursday Wraps

What a mean, miserable day. The market players couldn't make up their minds whether they wanted it up or down. This is standard procedure after the beating Tuesday - every body is playing scared. As a result stocks are round tripping and we spend all day long bumping against the pivot point on the Q's -



Five times in six hours it hit the pivot (black line on the chart) - each time to rebound strongly. But as you can see yesterday was the same thing - inability to move through the pivot point. That suggests a difficult day for today.

I bought PAAS this morning and watched it go up and then it round tripped on me and I sold it off for a small loss this afternoon. That was the very first and very last time that I will buy a silver mining stock - I've always considered them to be a waste and I think this one is the biggest waste of all.

I bought TRA this afternoon and GRA and I may scale into DLX and RYI tomorrow. All I will do now is add to the portfolio on dips and let it run for awhile. Tomorrow I think I'll go back to day trading. TIE pretty much round tripped on the day too and if it doesn't get some steam tomorrow I'm going to dump it. I'd rather put the money into winners like AKS or RIO. XING came all the way back to where I bought it but I'm going to hold on to this one for awhile but I won't add to it. It has to prove itself and it couldn't even get to the pivot point today.

The model portfolio is now returning 1.23% and the SPY is returning 1.01% since inception.

The three guys (MSFT, GOOG, and AAPL) went their separate ways today. AAPL did real well, up 2.45, MSFT recovered from being down early and GOOG stayed down. I'll reiterate my message from the past couple of days in various posts - AAPL is going up, MSFT is range bound and will be forever, and GOOG is done. It had huge volume today and went nowhere.

The small caps are back - IWM made it into the green today.



That isn't unexpected the small caps have been taking the brunt of the beat-down because they have been so far ahead of everything else. But once again the pivot point was the line of demarcation. We need a break over the pivot point tomorrow and then we'll see what happens next.

The INDU ATR is above 144 which is always a good sign. I use the ATR as a proxy for volatility. When it is below 80 for the INDU the Dow 30 goes down and when it is above 120 the DOW 30 goes up. Not immediately but within days.

This indicator, NewMoMo is behaving normally - it is now officially really far down -



Any upward movement in the market tomorrow will spin this around on a dime and give 9 cents change.

The up/down ratio retreated to 33% which is violently oversold and the VIX remains more than 10% over its 10-period moving average. It must go back.

I'm calling tomorrow up. Although to be honest I prefer days like today for day trading.

The magic coin meanwhile, fresh off its success in calling today's market, calls tomorrow ... heads - bull market.

The score is now Marlyn 16 - 13 and 5 and the coin is 14 - 15 and 5.

The Edge

Let's say that the fundamental nature of most of the stocks that were crushed yesterday had nothing to do with their crushing - just that when a beat-down happens during a riot everything gets beat and names are taken afterward.

Let's also posit that the crushing was a bit overdone - as seems to be the sober consensus this morning.

And even though Europe and Asia are still being crushed - Europe is looping back up and the futures are massive green. What does that leave us?

Well let's say that you were to write a filter and what you would look for were stocks that up until Monday had appreciated more than 25% in the past 66 days and dropped more than 5% yesterday. (All of these numbers are totally arbitrary). And if you did that what do you think you would find? A long list of stocks that up until yesterday most every body wanted to own.

Then let's say you then went through these stocks looking for ones with smooth, ever-rising closing prices for the past 6 months or so in the range of 15 to 35 dollars with high average volume and ones that you'd want to own too or maybe even ones you'd owned once in the past - what do you think you'd get out of that? About 30 matches among which we find -

AKS, RIO, TIE, TRA, GGB, PAAS, SINA, RYI, GRA, SSRI, ICON, DLX

And I'm calling this short list "my recovery portfolio" and let's see where it goes.

And if you think I am the only person who is doing this at this time of the morning (4:30 A.M. EST) you are nuts. There are 8500 fund managers out there who have ordered their minions to do the same thing - because we are all after the same thing - the edge.