XL-entLady's Account Talk

[XL-entLady]

Lady,

Would now be a good time to initiate the movie game once again - for slow tight range days. The game would allow more participation.

What a great idea, my friend!

We have two game threads. And I'm going to add another version.

For those of you who are newer to the MB:

The Movie Game rules: You can use one word for the title and carry it over to name another movie. For example, the first three entries were Star Wars, Dark Star, Dark Water.

The Movie Game 2 rules: The rules are these: From a given movie title, pick an actor in one of the lead roles and name another movie that actor starred in. You must name the actor and the new movie. Pick a different actor each time (in order to prevent naming all of the films that say, Charlie Sheen starred in). Example: if the Movie Title is say, "Rocky," your next post could be Sylvester Stallone: Rambo. Or it might be: Talia Shire: The Godfather.

The Movie Game 3 rules: Someone will post a relatively famous quote from a movie, the first one who guesses the movie chooses the next quote. Example: If I said, "What we have here is failure to communicate!" the correct answer would be "Cool Hand Luke."

 

[XL-entLady]

"In a nutshell, at this moment in history, the beginning, middle and end of each month (excluding the very last day) tend to be bullish, and the times in between bearish. The effect isn’t strong enough all by itself to justify a trade, but I do think it deserves to be one of many tools in the trader’s toolbox.
To illustrate, the following graph shows average excess return per day of the month for the S&P 500 over the last 20 years. Obviously every month doesn’t have exactly 21-days so I’ve normalized the data to always fit our 21-day chart.

​

See the W?"

http://marketsci.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/the-“monthly-w”-in-video/

 

[XL-entLady]

For anyone who doesn't know AlphaTrends, I heartily recommend it. Brian Shannon is conservative in his financial analysis and explains his thoughts well. Here's an excerpt from today's blog:

"The SPY is trying to find support at the 38.2% retracement of the May 6 low to the high last week, breaking below Friday’s low is likely to lead to a test of the 50% retracement which would also close the gap from last Monday. The VWAP “since the event” for the SPY is now found ~114.44 and that is a level the market will need to recapture before a test of last weeks support ~115 is tested and potentially becomes resistance. The market is still feeling aftershocks from the cascade lower and until it settles down the environment will favor shorter term traders."

http://www.alphatrends.net/

 

[XL-entLady]

"Comparing daily and weekly price gains, most people ignore the raw data and allow recent events to influence their opinions. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow) crashed nearly 1,000 points on May 6, the television shows focused more on the bounce from the intra-day low than the fact that the Dow still declined 346 points on the day. I cannot remember the last time a 300-point drop was seen as good news, but anchoring on the crash influenced perceptions.

The reverse played out this past week. With the S&P 500 moving 2.2% higher, it was a solid week. However, the trend of prices produced a different feeling. Markets initially rallied sharply on the European Union's (EU) rescue package, but then faded over the remainder of the week. Finishing with consecutive daily declines, never has a 2.2% weekly gain felt so bad.

Understanding anchoring and emotions will be essential over coming weeks. A market that once rallied on every piece of information has taken a skeptical turn. Recently, the majority of market movements have been driven by investor sentiment and I expect that process to continue. Economic numbers are improving and companies are reporting robust profits, but until concerns over extraneous shocks such as Greece wane, it will be difficult for markets to move much higher. Instead, we should expect the trench warfare to continue with prices swinging wildly, but making little overall progress."


http://seekingalpha.com/article/205593-trading-an-emotion-driven-market?source=hp_wc

Spouse says we're going camping today. So keep the place nailed down for me until Friday!

 

[nasa1974]

Lady, Have a good time and send us a neat picture or two.

 

[XL-entLady]

Had a wonderful week and just got back, Yeesh, made the mistake of looking at the market charts. :blink: Leave for 5 days and the world falls apart!

Nasa, as requested, here's a pic of what I spent the last week doing. Maybe I'd better load back up and go back! :cheesy:

View attachment 9462

 

[KevinD]

Nice!

 

[nnuut]

What a view that's a beautiful place, did Ya have fun though? Camping good stuff for a while, but sometimes coming home makes the trip worthwhile. Just something I've noticed about vacations.:laugh:

 

[grandma]

Hmmm- I can smell the trees! ...good to have you back; your lack of posts has been noticeable !

 

[tsptalk]

Ah, red rocks. Nice! Welcome back!

 

[crws]

Cool! Looks awesome!

 

[nasa1974]

Great picture. Thank you Lady. Welcome back.

 

[XL-entLady]

Thank you all for the warm welcome back! Yes, Norm, I had fun. In fact, we had a blast! There were five of us, me, Spouse, Spouse's brother and his wife, and our neighbor. Neighbor's wife was at a gambling tournament, which is what happens when you live this close to Nevada! :cheesy:

We did the modern day version of circling the wagons and we didn't rough it much, as you can tell from this photo! Our trailer and green side-by-side are the ones on the left. You can see my SIL relaxing with her magazine.

View attachment 9466

Each day we spent hours taking the roads around the area looking at the beautiful rock formations. At night we would come back and grill a steak and swap stories until the chill drove us inside.

One day we found an unusual grazing allotment. Longhorns and more longhorns!

View attachment 9467

It was a great trip! But I missed you guys!

 

[tsptalk]

That's where the bulls went last week. It makes sense now.

 

[nnuut]

Looks like Great fun, but not quite ruffing it!!! Well I'm out to the patio to cut some soffit replacements.

 

[XL-entLady]

Jeff Piesch's "Market Rewind" is always a must-read for me. Here's some of today's blog:

(Click Image to Enlarge/ ETF Rewind Glossary)

"Last weekend there were early warnings of a potential 200-day break on the S&P 500 (SPY) and that's exactly what we got with the index down -4.2%, about half a percent below its 10-month moving average.

While a recapture of that level is probably in the cards, everything is a trade for now and without a significant catalyst, many will be looking for short entries or to cash out on strength."

http://marketrewind.blogspot.com/

Please note that the blog has disabled the link that allows the chart to be enlarged. A person must have to subscribe to his premium service to get that now. Too bad. :::heavy sigh:::

 

[XL-entLady]

Here's another blog that I've always liked because Carl Swenlin seems to be speaking to intermediate-term traders. I was surprised by his latest blog. It helped me to breathe a little easier. Here is some of it:

"With the market in a dizzying decline, some of our subscribers are wondering why our market posture is only neutral. Where's the sell signal? ...Our foremost objective is to avoid losing money during declines. Short selling losses can have a double negative effect regarding our performance versus the market, so we try to limit it to only those times where the odds favor success.

This doesn't prevent individuals developing techniques that allow them to be more aggressive, but the parameters of the T/TM are intended to function within an intermediate time frame, with the hope of filtering out shorter-term swings.

Bottom Line: There is no need to expect a signal change for at least a couple of weeks. We think that the most likely next signal will be a new buy signal, resulting from a rally that ends the correction; however, the market needs to stop going down before it can go up."



http://blogs.stockcharts.com/

 

[crws]

Thanks for the link- looks like a good site.
I wonder- where do people get all the time for all their research and charting??
Takes me hours or days to get a complex excel sheet set up.

 

[nasa1974]

Lady, Sure looks like you had a great time roughing out in the middle of no where.

 

[XL-entLady]

Eulogy for Integrity

I've been noticing all the TV commercials lately that are built around screwing the other guy however you can. I read in the newspapers that the greatest ecological disaster of our time was caused because people got payoffs for not doing their jobs correctly. Our country has gone from a balanced budget to being trillions of dollars in debt because big corporations figured out a way to screw us all out of our grandchildren's inheritance.

And I wonder what happened to personal integrity?

We used to have it. My children were raised with a family motto, "Knowledge, Integrity, Family," because in ascending order of importance that's what we wanted them to learn was vital to being a responsible adult. The motto was on family t-shirts and on decorated signs around the house and we talked about it all the time. And we still try to live that way. When I grew up that was not unusual. When did it change?

I was deposed once as part of preliminary actions for a state grand jury and a law enforcement officer who had known me for a long time told the rest of the room, "You can take what she says to the bank. She's the only really straight arrow I know." Huh?

I'm not saying this to pat myself on the back. I'm saying this because I read someone's comment recently that "we all have done something shady to get ahead in this world." Excuse me! ::::Waving hand!:::: Not everybody!

What happened to make this kind of a statement the norm? Why is that the excuse for the mess we're in now?

When did Integrity die?