Intra-Day Update: Happy Halloween!

UPDATE 10:26am EDT: I don’t expect much excitement in the next few hours, seems we’re range bound as of now. The stars lined up very nicely for the bears this morning, but I presciently smelled a fake out and stayed out, which I’m very thankful for right now. Berk and I have been mostly in cash for a week now, and it’s getting boring – could have taken the week off or worked on my devious plans for market domination.

Watch the 1333 pivot on the NQ and the 9200 on the YM right now, if we breach those with confidence we might see some fireworks.

Anyway, while we watch the paint dry, here is this:

UPDATE 11:01am EDT: In the last few days I have come across two articles which opine that the smartest move for homeowners underwater might be to just walk away. Here’s one by Barry Ritholtz and one by Karl Denninger. I admire both of their work, and if I was sitting on a underwater mortgage right now (which I am not, since I am equipped with the rare ability to solve mathematical equations) then I would seriously consider doing this. Saving all those mortgages might be politically desirable but from an economic prospective a majority of the mortgages written after 2005 need to fail – they are not sustainable and I don’t know why anyone would want to pay $3k/month on a mortgage that’s worth $1k/month at best.

UPDATE 11:16am EDT: Those pivots I mentioned were just breached. Let’s see if we get a retest, but maybe we’ll see a bit of a rally now.

UPDATE 12:32pm EDT: Nothing much to report on either side – bull or bear. As expected, we’re just gyrating around today. Two notable events however: Light Sweet Crude is at 71 and Mr. VIX dropped below 60.

UPDATE 1:41pm EDT: I stepped out for a while and returned just to realize I had missed out on a nice rally. I’m seeing a few pivots overhead:

YM: 9400
NQ: 1356
ES: 983 – there’s also a 993 retracement level.

If we breach those we should rally hard, although at this very moment some of my other ‘mystery indicators’ are telling me that momentum is abating. This might change of course – seems the bulls are in full control at this point – I don’t see any significant selling pressure.

UPDATE 2:28pm EDT: We just put in a nice a,b,c and seem to be rallying higher – the probabilities for a drop are greatly diminished in my view. Assuming 972 holds it’s possible we see 983 or even higher before the close.

UPDATE 3:02pm EDT: Just wanted to let you guys know that the daily effective Fed Funds Rate today was 0.3%. It’s basically free money. Ponder on that over the weekend.

UPDATE 6:21pm EDT: Just got an email from ThinkOrSwim announcing the new version of the TOS desktop, which will be available tomorrow early morning. One salient feature will be the ability to export/import Prophet watchlists – something I have been clamoring for all year. THANK YOU TIM KNIGHT! This will allow us to share watchlists right here from our the EvilSpeculator blog. I’m even considering writing an export module that would produce a watchlist on the fly. Being a tech nerd and all, I’ll have to do some reverse engineering tomorrow once I get my meddling hands on an output – will keep you posted on what I find out 😉

UPDATE Saturday 5:02pm EDT: Okay, I just checked and I won’t have to bother writing a TOS import module. What’s being exported/imported into Prophet charts is a simple CSV file (comma separated values). Actually there is a carriage return after each symbol just like this:

GOOG
BIDU
MA
CCJ

Stick this in a file but make sure you use a plain text editor. On the Mac I prefer Aquamacs Emacs since that one guarantees not to add any hidden characters like for instance Word would. On Windows you can either use the Notepad or any other text only editor (again, not M$ Word). Save it as filename.csv and you’re ready to import. Easy cheesy lemon squeeze.