Steady As She Goes

I am starting to slow down my trading activities a little as I’m busy preparing for a trip down to the Costa Blanca here in Spain. In case you missed some of my lamentations from previous years: The beginning of March marks the launch of Las Fallas, which slowly metamorphoses the city of Valencia from a quiet secondary Spanish enclave into the veritable Sodom and Gomorrha of Europe.

And we just happen to live in the center of it all, which is a lot of fun the very first time around but a huge annoyance and source of stress and noise pollution every single year thereafter. As a Valenciano you are basically given two choices – either get into the spirit and join the big party, or get the hell out of dodge while you still can. Guess which option we have chosen? That’s right – we are out of here starting Thursday until the 21st of March.

In case you are wondering, all services will continue as usual – just like last year and the year before it. And it’s not that I’m going to some remote location without connectivity. Although I won’t be schlepping all my gear with me I’ll pop in from time to time if I see a juicy entry or some important inflection point that’s worth mentioning. In the interim I have managed to once again convince Scott Phillips to fill in during my absence. And by convince I mean threatening him to release some of the incriminating photos I took of him during his last visit at the lair 🙂

Alright thus far it’s steady as she goes on the equities front. I’ll be advancing my trailing stop later today should price action continue to point upward. I did have to roll into June however as CME equity futures are about to roll over.

I’m happy to say that we did get our entry in gold. As you may recall we were waiting for a nice spike low touching 1322.50 or below – which is exactly what we got – as ordered. My ISL remains < 1314 for now and once gains reach 1R I’ll be advancing it to break/even.

We also took a long entry in crude above that beautiful double bottom that now seems to be on the map. And by we I mean yours truly and you as well if you were a sub – if not remedy that unfortunate personal failing quickly and efficiently by clicking here. Anyway we are now trailing < 62 and I’ll make sure to sacrifice a chicken burger to keep the market Gods in good spirit.

Unfortunately the ZB is starting to look like a stop out. The odds were low here to begin with as gravity is still excepting a strong bias, which is exactly why we kept our position sizing very small. You don’t bet the farm against an ongoing trend and it now looks like bond traders may continue to experience more downside for some time to come.

Finally my Bitcoin campaign reverted to my trail and got stopped out leaving me with about 0.7R in profit. Nothing to write home about but given the market phase it’s in it’s to be expected. And by that I mean that all that volatility led us into a sideways range during which BTC is trying to figure out where it wants to go next.

The daily chart right now still looks bullish to me but buying pressure continues to be lacking and crypto traders aren’t exactly known to be the patient type, except maybe for the HODL monkeys who simply hold and forget. If we see another leg lower I do however think that the 7000 mark has good odds of holding up, depending of course on the veracity of the sell off. Liquidity and exchange access issues have the potential to produce big outlier moves, the odds of which we may be under estimating.