Repost...

I think this post from this morning (10:38 a.m.), FX Moves is worth a repost, there are a lot of posts that have excellent market concepts and market behavior that many of us are not aware of mostly due to "Technical Analysis Dogma", unfortunately mainstream Technical Analysis has progressed very little since 1990 and the actions and reactions of technical traders are so predictable that Wall St. routinely uses Technical Analysis concepts against traders. For instance the notion of a "W" or "Double bottom" which according to Technical Analysis should see the second low fall just short of testing the first low, other technicians expect a test of support and look for it to hold, the fact is Wall Street knows all of this and they use it against technical traders. Almost all double bottoms (and double tops, just the concept in reverse) see support broken in what I call a head fake move or a False Breakout / False Break-down.

This post has several concepts I think are worth reading again, I will highlight some of them I think are especially useful in red.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

FX Moves

This is the move that just sent the averages lower, but as mentioned in the first post today...

We are looking for at least the "W" bottom so the move is not surprising. A "W" bottom is the minimum we need for stability to place some short term long trades, there's always the chance that a "W" turns in to a series of then which would be a trading range, but judging from the mid term and longer term 3C charts, I don't think this market can hold up that long.

So none of this should be surprising, but here are the FX moves that caused it, I don't know yet if there was any news as a catalyst, but it doesn't really matter, the currencies were going to make these moves and so were the markets.

The $USDX ($US Dollar Index) 1 and 5 min futures...

 $USD has been moving up all night, this actually starts just after the close yesterday when the currency post telling us to expect this move was posted. Remember strength in the $USD puts downward pressure on the market and risk assets like commodities and precious metals. This very recent spike is what's causing the weakness in the market this morning.

 Here's the 5 min chart, the red is when the Futures post written late Monday night/early Tuesday a.m. was posted telling us to expect Dollar downside (which is market supportive which we saw yesterday) and at the white area is yesterday's after market post telling us to expect dollar strength (market negative).

The Euro (moves the mirror opposite generally against the $USD and has the opposite effect on the market)

 1 min Euro futures shot down this morning around the open, that puts negative pressure on risk assets/the market.

5 min Euro futures showing the same areas with the same posts mentioned above and you can see how the Euro has lost quite a bit of ground this morning, pressuring the market.

One quick word about "W" bottoms or what some might call a double bottom (very small one) is they don't act like they use to, which is to say the second bottom usually fell short of the low of the first bottom, Technical Analysis expects that or market support at the first bottom's low, so we generally see a head fake move below support, trapping technical traders and giving us a great entry at great prices and lower risk.