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A Bullish Sign in the “Golden Cross”?
In case you’ve missed it, technical analysts have been atwitter over sightings of the mystical-sounding “golden cross”. Among the latest observations from the mainstream business press are a Barron’s...
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Weekly Portfolio Update, Part II
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks since our last market analysis, to say the least. After three days closing in the 950–956 resistance zone, the S&P 500 index rallied to new 2009 highs,...
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Weekly Portfolio Update
First and foremost, we’re well-positioned for current market conditions. In the half-hour before yesterday’s close, our August trades were showing a loss of less than 2% on total capital at risk, with...
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Weekly Portfolio Update
Buyers left the building with Elvis today, with breadth (advancing issues vs. declining issues) more than 5:1 negative and down volume exceeding up volume by a factor of more than 17:1; every sector...
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Adjust Trade Alert: SPY February/March Calendar Spread (Adjustment #3)
Even after this morning’s adjustment, with the market down another percent and a half today, we still have too much delta for our current level of unrealized loss. We’re rolling the remainder of our...
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Supplemental Trade Alert: Open MCD June/July Calendar Spread
We like to have at least three weeks left before expiration when we initiate a calendar-spread strategy, so it’s now or never if we’re going to have a Supplemental Trade this month. The Bonus Trade I...
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A Bubble in the Pot of Gold?
The comment I posted in response to Jared’s latest feature article, “Why Conventional Hedging Methods Fail”, alluded to my opinion that gold is the current leading candidate for what I’ll call “bubble...
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Storytelling and Technical Analysis
Humans can’t not tell stories: that’s the result of decades of research in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy into our tendency to string together disparate events into...
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How to Perform Technical Analysis on the VIX
Just kidding: you can’t. By “technical analysis” I mean the practice of drawing inferences about likely future prices based on the visual patterns displayed on a chart. We can exclude rules-based,...
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Volatility Analysis: The Next Step in Trading
Every investment is an instance of a more general schema: Because of q, I believe that p, so I will risk some money to make a profit if p is true. The proposition p could be about anything: it could be...
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Technical Analysis and the VIX, Revisited
We have our internal debates here at Condor Options (after all, group-think is a sign of an unhealthy organization), and one of them is about how much in the field of technical analysis is useful and...
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Top Five Trading Myths
These are the top five trading myths that we would kill right now if we could. Since human brains are wired to remember often-repeated associations as true even if they’re false, we’ll state the true...
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An A Priori Argument Against the Technical Analysis of Leveraged ETFs
One of the trading myths we noted recently has generated some questions. There seem to be some passionate proponents of applying technical analysis to leveraged ETF charts out there, and while that...
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More Technical Analysis of the VIX
Back in December, we considered whether the VIX, despite how fundamentally different it is from an equity or commodity, might be a good candidate for technical analysis after all. We haven’t come up...
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Long Vega Plays for a Market Breakout
As pictured below, equity indexes have been highly range-bound since the end of April. That trading range has been between about 470 and 510 in the Russell 2000, and 865 and 930 in the S&P 500. I...
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