Yesterday was my first day back at the gym and managed to snap right back into my full routine in stark contrast of me barely being able to walk upright just last Sunday. As the saying goes: No Pain – No Gain, or in Yuletide terms: No Lift No Gift! Which pretty much has been my motto for most of this year as I’ve been working my ass off 10 hours plus seven days a week on the quant system front, all of which is slowly starting to pay off now. More on that to follow over the coming weeks after alpha testing has completed.
It’s FOMC day and I’m pretty much going to sit on my hands until all the dust settles. Speaking of which, my real life hands happen to be in bad shape these days. It turns out that punching walls and occasionally people as well as several hundred fist push ups per week combined with constant keyboard usage actually takes a toll on your mitten fillers given enough time. Suffice to say my traumatologist isn’t happy as he had to give me my second course of cortisone for this year after my left middle finger ended up being stuck retracted in the morning.
The equity market in particular has become extremely good at luring and then trapping people into highly volatile reversals. Which especially is true for those rare moments when we may be tempted to trade against the prevailing trend, which of course continues up, up, and then up. Given the increasing number of traps placed in front of us on a weekly basis I have a hard time imagining how anyone could succeed trading equities on a long term basis without the aid of some sort of participation measure (a.k.a. market lie detector) as for example our very own Zero indicator:
Not surprisingly we are now seeing a bit of post Thanksgiving profit taking on both the equity and currency side. Had I not been stopped out on Friday already I most definitely would have been yesterday. And now the trails of both of my forex campaigns also received a visit so I’m almost all in cash. Holiday weeks are great periods for break-out formations due to less liquidity allowing institutional traders to leverage their market moving capabilities and pin the tape to their liking.