Monday, September 2, 2013

The Week Ahead

I hope everyone had a great and safe holiday weekend. I'm going to keep tonight's post relatively short because everything that can be said about the market and futures tonight and most likely moving forward this week, has already been said, especially Friday.

In numerous posts Friday I commented on what a busy day it was, and for an op-ex (weeklies) Friday, it was uncharacteristically busy for us.

In Friday's after hours P/L post, I showed a lot of the positions, I closed the SLV $24 puts for a gain of 30% and 54% and good thing!.

I closed DUST long, IYT short, IBM short, TLT long (another good thing), closed the Tech short (long TECS).

I described some of the action this way...

"As you know, for a Friday, today was extremely busy.

I moved around quite a few positions today, I'll show you why, part of it is I think there's potential for a large enough base that it's worth trading around to free up dry powder for other positions while cutting assets facing draw-down, almost all of these I plan on re-establishing, but in certain cases it just made sense not to have drawdown when those assets could be used in a position that can advance with the market, others I simply won't let go of (Core shorts) because of personal rules and because I won't get another entry like the original one."

There were about 7 new trade ideas or positions added Friday alone with all of the additional positions closed, that's an unusual amount of activity, but it was driven by the charts.

Did I know Obama was going to do what he did? No. Do I believe based on the 3C charts that caused me to take so many actions that the market knew something, YES! Just look at the day and remember how slow op-ex Friday's usually are, it's right there, whether you chose to believe there's a connection or not is up to you, I have very little doubt the knew something and I think the market has had a feeling as this bounce behavior has been brewing.

I think these (it looks like almost 10 days or so) until Congress takes up the Syrian issue has given the market a rest from uncertainty in the immediate future and is a perfect time to bounce and then the uncertainty is probably going to line up as a perfect time for the market to be knocked lower again.

Here are a few charts just to get you up to speed.

 ES (SPX futures) 5 min chart have gained 14 points since the 4 p.m. Friday print.

Treasuries got knocked on their butt as Futures opened Sunday night and recall I like the TLT long, but something told me to close the position Friday so the dry powder could be used in a position that was going to move soon.

Crude oil and gold were both knocked down, but have regained most of that, but remember I closed the last of the SLV $24 Puts Friday?

Look at how Silver jumped, much different than gold, so 3C was telling us something VERY clear on Friday about the market in general and these assets in particular like shorts, Treasury longs like TLT and Silver shorts/Puts.

Hopefully if you didn't have a chance to make some moves Friday we'll get a little breather tomorrow and find some positions we can add, but Friday was busy for a reason, I'll leave it to you to judge whether you think the President of the United States makes a decision that big in just a few hours (after the market closed).