Closing Tick and Core Positions

For a day that was rather tame by recent standards, the NYSE TICK was interesting to watch, this is a good way to get a quick idea of market breadth without breaking out all of the indicators which I may do any way.

 Today's price/volume trade was something like a rounding bottom. The first TICK that hit in the +1500 area was basically the SPY hitting flat point of 0% move on the day, it went a bit higher than that. The second was not quite at the break-even point and it wasn't in a particularly interesting area, not a huge solid price candle, bot a blow off top at the high of the move, just in the move at +1400.  That's 1400 more stocks moving up that minute than what were moving down, anything above 1000 is strong, above +1250 or -1250 is in the extreme area, +1400/+1500 is generally about as high as you go even in the most bullish of bull rallies, you don't see it often and interestingly not usually on a day that's down -0.19%.

This is the TICK (1 min.) for the last 3 days which have all had interesting moments, but today is clearly trending higher and away from the downside extremes. In blue I created a quick custom cumulative price indicator, it adds or subtracts each bar whether it is positive or negative and I smoothed it a bit so you can see the trend.

I have a lot to look at, scan and update now. If you have ZNGA long, congratulations, that was a decent position and as I said I still think it has quite a bit of upside, in my opinion today was just a teaser.

UNG is not bothersome to me, there's a decent gap from the +5% move up on 11/13, the last time UNG did the exact same thing in filling the gap back on the 9/11 gap up and filled the next week before heading higher.

AMZN I think is decent here as a short term long trade, it put in a indecision day which means the downside momentum is fading out and it did it right under a bearish descending triangle, it's in the perfect spot for a bear trap and saw good 3C positive divergences today.

FB really didn't go anywhere since the exit yesterday and has short term negative divergences, one thing I like about FB is it trades completely independent of the market's magnetism, that may not be a good thing for FB in the near term when the market lifts as it won't automatically draft the market. In my opinion it's becoming risk without an edge and opportunity cost; it still has great longer term prospects.

BIDU-my opinion hasn't changed, I'd much rather be short BIDU than long, but the market has its cycles.

As far as Core Short Positions still open (NO LEVERAGE), IOC is the biggest winner at +19% and I'm not especially worried about it, the speculative ERX long should easily hedge IOC. As with all of the core shorts, hopefully we'll get a really great opportunity to enter these at much higher prices.

IBM is the next open core short at +12%, this is more of a substitute for a Dow Short, we've had 2 really nice shorts in IBM this year. IBM does have some positive divergences, on the whole they aren't as positive as the average or the averages. IBM is hedged with a speculative size long in UDOW.

TJX is up +7%, this is a stock that has a ton of potential on the short side, we got an awesome entry when you look at the bigger picture and this is why I'm hesitant to close positions like this, in fact I'd like to see a chance to add to TJX, I can see this one getting cut in half easily and if we pyramid up short positions' profits, we should be able to make that an even bigger gain.

BEAV is up 6%, this one came out of a top breakdown volatility shakeout from Feb-April this year, this is one that should have had partial profits taken as it was up about 17%, but the countertrend move to the upside is ending now, there's probably a good chance to open a new position if you like the idea or to add to an existing one. This has enormous potential on the downside and that's why I didn't want to get too fancy trying to trade around it.

XOM is another core short, I think ERX is enough to hedge it, XOM is currently at break-even and as such is the worst performer of the core short positions-should have added to XOM above $92.

The GOOG short is the last of the core short positions although I'll be looking to add back some that were closed like BIDU and PCLN which gave us about a +26% profit and thankfully we closed it when we did or else we'd have 10% drawdown on that one. As for GOOG, it's really a partial position as a phased entry was always the plan there, but to bring it up to full size, just waiting for the opportunity with a pop in price, I'd like to see GOOG at $700+ for an add to.

Note that all of the core positions are short except UNG, that's because that's the path of least resistance and highest probabilities, that doesn't mean we can't make money on an upside move.

If all goes according to plan, we should make some good money on spec. leveraged longs while they hedge core shorts, at some point the longs are sold for a profit, the shorts are added to or initiated (BIDU/PCLN, etc.) and we see the next leg down.

Of course if anything changes as we move up then we'll adjust to the market.