Intra-Day Update: Hardcore Rats

UPDATE 9:45am EST: If you are actually sitting in front of your workstation this morning staring at the ticker: Congratulations – you are officially a hardcore steel rat! Those mushy post-pagan winter solstice celebrations won’t get in the way of you making a buck! That’s the spirit!

Maybe I shouldn’t tell anyone that I spent all day yesterday making some final fine adjustments on the Zero and fixing a few minor issues caused by the TOS update. Mrs. Evil was less than pleased, but duty goes first down here in the evil lair.

I don’t expect much fireworks until January 5th but intend to stick around during trading hours, so you’re not alone. The TNX has not moved – but who cares – the Fed is now buying their own paper. The Yen is lethargically showing up for work today – I don’t think the news that the Japanese are considering ‘drastic currency action’ will do much good for long but it’ll do its job during the holiday tape.

I know we’re a small crew here today, but let’s make this worth our time. We should all take extra effort to go out there and collect some intel so that we can hit the ground running on January 5th.

Finally, watch the December 12th low (851) – if that one gives there’s really not much left supporting our short term bullish scenario. However, until we breach that level I will keep the medium term trend set to up. On a short term basis I think we’re going to see some sideways action, at least before Monday.

UPDATE 10:41am EST: I’m so bloody bored – haven’t seen a decent signal for … what… ten days or so? Maybe I can catch up on some reading – LOL 🙂

UPDATE 11:48am EST: Okay, I added a new rule to the VTAs and PTAs:

The candle must be positive in order for the VTA/PTA to hold.

Obviously, thin tape or not – we don’t want to hold on to a new position while the candle is dropping negative. Price must reflect the sentiment.

I don’t think that is a problem with strong signals, and that’s why I haven’t added it thus far. However, with thin tape like this you might get false positives which can add up over time. So, I think this is a good rule – hope everyone agrees. I love to buy on the dips as well, but larger dips which are followed by strong signals and white candles 😉

UPDATE 1:05pm EST: DZZ alerted us to Gold:

I’m planning to grab some puts around 875 – if that breaches I might actually go long.

UPDATE 1:29pm EST: I thought I’d share this little tidbit with you guys:

Now, I think this is a very nice visual depiction of why option traders want to stay the heck out of this market right now. The hourly 10-day Average True Range (ATR) on the SPX is about 5.5 right now. As you can see it’s been steadily dropping since November 24th when it was about 20. Also, check out the stochastics – we are smack in the middle and pointing down after pointing up. Translation: Anything can happen right now – and whatever happens it’ll be slow and painful. Unless you’re a futures trader – don’t even bother right now. Maybe the best this tape has to offer is some training ground for fledgling ES futures traders 😉