The 2 p.m. Op-Ex Pin Hour

This has been a fairly long standing trend, on option expiration Friday which use to be the third Friday/Saturday of the month we'd see what was called the "Max Pain Pin", it was the level in which the most amount of options would expire worthless, not so much on an open interest basis, but an actual dollar basis as you can have 10,000 open interest at $.02 or 2000 open interest at $1.

 Usually by 2 pm or so (at least my broker would call multiple times and ask what I was going to do with expiring positions), most contracts are wrapped up and the actual pin is no longer needed. From 2 p.m. on price seems to do whatever it wants, but has little bearing on what happens the next day, however the 3C signals during the last 3 2 hours are very important. You may recall the post "Come Monday" in which the signals were given a very hard pattern to call, a trading range and the following week was a trading range for the entire week, so the 3C signals the last hour tend to be very important as they tend to pick up where they left off the next trading day. I showed earlier the small QQQ negative divegrence in to the close yesterday on a 1 min chart and this morning it gapped down along the lines of a 1 min chart.

So I'll be looking more for those, but from what I'm seeing in assets like AAPL , BIDU and many others, it looks like Monday may be very ugly indeed.

Since there has been so much of the 1929 analog Dow chart going around, let me remind you that the first 4 days iof the 1929 crash erased 25% of the Dow's value alone.