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Thursday, August 10, 2006

What's It Gonna Take?

OK, so let me get this straight. The world narrowly avoids having a slew of commercial passenger jets being blown out of the sky, sending thousands of innocent civilians to a horrible, terrifying death, and the market goes UP? Even airlines ended the day in positive territory! What the hell?

I would like to provide a handy reference, based on today's action, for any future news and how it will affect the market:

Russia Declares Nuclear War on the U.S.: Dow down 37 points
Nuclear Strike Annihilates Free World: Dow down 52 points
Joe Lieberman gives George Bush a tongue kiss: Dow up 254 points on record volume.

This is just ridiculous.

Well, in spite of my pissed-off tone, my portfolio actually did OK today. The only reason is that (1) I closed out my SPX and OEX puts early in the day, since I could sense today's action was completely messed-up (2) I have a lot of oil-related shorts. But, even so, today's action was just stupid.

It took me one glance at one chart early in the day to know there was trouble. This is the S&P 400 MidCap (daily basis), and as you can see by my mark-up, we are not in the series of lower highs and lower lows that we need. This sucker seems to be strengthening.

I've bombarded you guys with enough charts over the past few days. I'm going to go stew for a while.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

More of What We Want

Today's action is exactly what we want to see. Good news in the market. Excitement. A big up opening. Chip, chip, chip away at it. And wind up with a big loss. Perfect. Even the commenters on this board were talking about an up day and a two day rally. Come on, folks! Are you kidding me? Cisco? Do you really think anyone cares about that dog anymore? How 1999!

A few have asked me to look at NILE. I did, and I moved on. It's an awful chart. I couldn't tell you whether it's going to go up or down. It's just a mess and not worth following.

Some people were puzzled at my dismissal of Cisco. Yeah, it's a big company, but so were Ford and GM. Cisco is yesterday's news. I mean, look at what it's done over the past two years. A 0% change. Wow, that's a barn-burner.

The Dow Transports got ripped today, and they are decisively below both a major ascending trendline as well as the Fib level. Nasty. Great for us bears, though, especially the Dow Theory fans.

Once again I offer a handful of my charts that I'm short (or, more likely, am long puts). This is just a smattering of my 50 or so positions. Here we go.....ATW:

BSC:

CERN:

CME:

COG:

DO:

FMX:

The key is to keep hacking away at the bulls, day by day. One day things are going to break hard. But we need to break their spirit first.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Fed Day is Out of the Way

Well, today's post-Fed rally lasted about as long as a bull in bed: 30 seconds or so. These guys are such turds. They bid up the market like mad in anticipation of a pause. BFD. Is a slowing economy great news for earnings? The market is doomed, people. Get real.

Here's a minute by minute chart of the DIA. You can see the massive micro-rally take place here if you look really close:

The $VIX is well positioned for a long, meaningful upswing. That'll be great for the bears.

Oh, do you need a good contrarian indicator? Check out Business Week's cover story. It features this kid on the cover claiming he's made $60 million on his Internet idea. He hasn't. It's bullsh*t. The editors dreamed up some hypothetical value for his firm, multipled it by his stake, and came up with the figure. I have no doubt this chap will get rich, but isn't this jumping the gun a bit? Smells like 1999, doesn't it, folks?

I've got something like 50 positions in the market, all of them puts or shorts. There's no way I'm going to show you all the charts, but let me throw a few interesting ones your way. Setting a good stop price is going to be up to you.

CAM:

IPS:

LEN:

OIH:

PBR:

PD:

Oh, let's do a hurricane5 update. Nutrisystem - target price of $600 - current price today, after getting smacked over 7% - is $45.58. And Hansen - target price $120 - currently at $29.45. Way to go, 'cane. I wonder if he is lurking to see what people are saying. Nah, I doubt it. Way too painful.

Anyway, congratulations to all of us for having the brass nads to get through this ridiculous Fed nonsense. Now we can turn our attention back to grinding bulls into hamburger.