Tuesday, August 25, 2009

MARKET COMMENTARY (8-25-09)

Starting today, I will be extremely busy. I am preparing for my first day of school on August 31st. As you know, I will be starting a new shrink program. I have many, many reasons to do this, but I have no idea why I really chose to go back to UMD. I've been having recurring dreams for over a year telling me that I have to go "find something". Who knows what that is, but my dreams or visions are usually correct. Say what you want, but I'm not crazy. I executed the delegation of my responsibilities in all of my businesses yesterday, except for my personal trading and anything that's internet-related.

Most of you figured out the way I day trade. You see a lot of break even trades for a reason, and that reason is because I am testing out the market. I have to see what is working early on, and when I do, that's when I go in "heavy" sometimes doubling or tripling my positions. It's pretty simple if you think about it: find what works then heavily allocate your capital to the best ideas, thus maximizing your gains and limiting your losses. Winning almost everyday is not some kind of bizarre mystery or stock market "secret"...which also brings me to another point.

I still don't get why people complicate trading with complicated and worthless indicators, computer programs, spreadsheets, or anything else that wastes your time. Here's a tip - if you can't even trade profitably and consistently off of the
basics, then you're going to run into major problems down the road. No method is 100% perfect, but make sure you perfect the basics first, then move onto other shit.

This post will be two parts: the usual SPX analysis and the biotech/pharma sequential breakout analysis.

First, the SPX charts in the following timeframes: 2-day, 5-day, 10-day, 1-month.




Now, I heavily day traded biotech stocks yesterday. By heavily, I mean that I was executing trades every 1-3 minutes which made it pointless for you to follow. I took the charts for BCRX, NVAX, SVA, INO, HEB, VICL, DVAX, and AGEN and stuck them all together into one image.

Yes, I know that some are not swine flu related, but they moved anyway, didn't they? I could careless what you think and only care about WHAT is moving. I find out the WHY part later, after my trades are finished.



Click to enlarge

The long black vertical line marks the breakouts for BCRX and NVAX, which were the first breakouts of the group. Scroll down a little to INO. The remaining charts show sky blue boxes. These mark the delayed movements in the rest of the group where you only had several minutes to take action.

The long red vertical line marks the pullbacks for BCRX and NVAX. Note how SVA pulled back first, HEB kept going higher, and some of the others just didn't move at all. During pullbacks, you want to heavily allocate towards the strongest in the sector, which was HEB (you can check out my twitter stream and assess how urgent I made it to get into HEB).

The area between the long black vertical line and the long red vertical line shows the breakout volume. Volume should and must be heavy for a stock to gain momentum, which reduces the risk of failure.

The area between the long red vertical line and the long green vertical line shows the importance of pullback volume. For most of the stocks, you should see lower, steady volume, which indicates a healthy consolidation zone. High volume inside this zone flashes a big warning sign of instability.

The period after the long green vertical line is mixed. You can see secondary breakouts in BCRX, NVAX, SVA, and VICL - all marked by heavy volume that should be similar to what you saw in the initial breakout volume area (between the black/red vertical lines).

Finally, chart patterns made sure that you got in at the right moment.

When you see 2 or more stocks in the same or similar industry/sector, then you must immediately scan and chart the entire group's components. Some of my biggest plays are due to sequential breakouts which give you windows of opportunity to get into stocks prior to high-probability breakouts. Good examples were my end of April/early May oil/gas shitstock plays in XTXI, XTEX, APL, AHD, and a few others. I believe I wrote a post on it, but I'm not going to dig for it.

That's your lesson for the day.