Is there anybody here into stock market?

[The Bad Ass Canadian]

The Fed and ECB have been printing hand over fist since the end of 2011. The big rally that we saw this first quarter is artificial and is about to end, unless they print even more.

Classic head and shoulders pattern forming on the daily chart, and bearish divergence on the RSI, on many of the indexes.

The market could take a swift ride to the downside, soon. I'm watching closely. Good gains to be had the past 4 months, but some people are gonna take profits soon.

Oil is the wildcard. High oil prices will keep the markets up. If you don't know how to trade and/or just want to "play around", get a fake account and practice trade. Read, study, learn.

It is a giant casino, as I said last year.

 

[Gaucho]

Classic head and shoulders pattern forming on the daily chart, and bearish divergence on the RSI, on many of the indexes.

The market could take a swift ride to the downside, soon. I'm watching closely. Good gains to be had the past 4 months, but some people are gonna take profits soon.

Oil is the wildcard. High oil prices will keep the markets up. If you don't know how to trade and/or just want to "play around", get a fake account and practice trade. Read, study, learn.

It is a giant casino, as I said last year.

H&S patterns and RSI regularly mean nothing. I'm yet to find a trader that has any type of edge using them and I've seen hundreds come and go.

High oil prices at the moment are supply induced, not demand driven so your statement on oil prices is wrong at this given juncture.

You will need a lot more than reading, studying like standard technical patterns or retail indicators. You will need to understand how markets really work and even then, you can have long periods of underperformance (like most hedge funds and traders are currently experiencing, given markets at this point in time are extremelly efficient. Every piece of news the market reprices instantly).

 

[Gaucho]

If you go to Yahoo finance, and look at the graphs, you'll notice that the S&P 500 has been following a bouncing ball pattern since 1996. For sure, stocks are headed for a rapid decline in a year or so and will bounce back after hitting maybe 650. This is just a bad time to buy into any stock. Maybe you should do one of those futures bets where you bet that the index will go down in 2013?

That is called buying long dated (named LEAP I believe) put options. Probably not a bad idea right now, mkt is looking toppy at the moment and VIX is extremelly low (which suits seasonality and options are cheap to buy when volatility is low given lower likelihood of hitting your strike).

 

[Gaucho]

Plus something as simplistic as boosts in juice demand during the summer period would already be factored into its share price.

Why buy shares if your betting on the underlying movement (i.e. betting on the movement of the price of orange juice). With shares, you are exposed to individual company risk and equity index risk in general. Your better off if you can afford it to trade the futures or CFDs (if you understand leverage), if not, use an ETF but be careful, they don't track the underlying product with the same beta.

Seasonality is a very strong factor in commodities and is very real. The fact it is known, one would assume it would then be factored in, but seasonality includes expectations of price movements over its lookback period, so it is still extremelly relevent.

Yes, sadly I am an absolute guru on financial markets, being a professional prop trading for years and a hedge fund manager for years, the epitome of all that is wrong with modern capitalism, but don't get me started on that.

 

[The Bad Ass Canadian]

You will need a lot more than reading, studying like standard technical patterns or retail indicators. You will need to understand how markets really work and even then, you can have long periods of underperformance (like most hedge funds and traders are currently experiencing, given markets at this point in time are extremelly efficient. Every piece of news the market reprices instantly).

I agree 100%.

I'm cautious on any upside potential, right now. Basically neutral , in the immediate term. I'm a self taught swing/day trader. It's impossible to predict the future but I think knowing certain basic chat patterns to watch for and watching some indicators can be of benefit.

You never know, so hedge accordingly.

 

[Gaucho]

I think there are obvious price patterns (but not those you read about in a book). And there are a lot of contrarian ways to think about the market. Then there are market internals (adv/dec used in the right context and used as a rolling average). 52wk highs and lows for breadth also. Volume spreads. Then there is money management. But RSI, MACD, head and shoulders don't have any edge IMHO.

 

[don't]

u guys are clueless. Get the IBD, Investor's Business Daily newspaper, many libraries take it. It's 10x the help that the Wall Street Journal is. Read HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN STOCKS, 4th edition, by William ONeal, publisher of the IBD, and CONFESSIONS OF A STOCK OPERATOR (Or some such, I forget the exact title) Use your local library's BOOKS IN PRINT catalogue, look in "subjects", under stocks, investing, etc. Once you have titles, authors, and ISBN #'s, use that info to order the books you want from your library's interlibrary book loan system.

 

[don't]

Most brokers let you do "fantasy trades" for free, for a while, by leaving $500 with them for a bit. You'll lose $50 at most, when you move on to the next broker, to use their system a bit. You'll soon find something that works for you, most of the time. Nothing is 100%, and it's best to move into gold coins and wait out the bear markets. The IBD will show you how to define such markets, btw.

 

[Poonani Maker]

People say, "Don't fight the Fed," but then you Also musn't fight the Obama reelection campaign, of which I think the Fed may be in tandem with. Currently the Fed is in divergence from BO's success. It's kind of like Oil and the S&P 500 being in divergence sometimes when MOST of the time it's in tandem. If one goes up, then the other (either oil or S&P) must follow either/or eventually. They cannot be afar away from each other for long for long. The same goes with the USD and gold, silver etc. Dollar up gold down. Dollar down gold up. Then there's the related Euro up, gold up (because dollar will be down against euro). Euro problems tanking the market and thus flight into the safety of cash, the world's reserve currency, the USD, then gold, silver, etc. down, AND deflation (bad for gold), inflation (good for gold). In a lot of ways, you have to just simply BE on the right side of NEWS STORIES and any given moment in time in order to win as a Trader. That is hard to do, cause there are a Lot of Bogus news stories, statistics, earnings reports (cooked books), Government job numbers (political manipulated figures to fool retail investors), and on and on and on. It's a giant Wash. You can't tell who's telling the truth at any given moment in time, because all morality, all integrity with our younger generation, my generation, and the baby boom gen, has been deteriorated to nil. Scum rules our country and we keep electing them. There is no Democracy anymore. These politicians, corporations, the extremely affluent rob us blind on a daily basis.

I'm not saying what I'm in atm (it has to do with bets on interest rates), but I'm trying not to fight the fed or obama, And I'm also trying not to get caught by a "sell in May" that we've seen in the past couple of years. You just don't know if a repeat will be the case. People say we are due, but I believe that volume is historically low and retailers are still pretty much out of the game, so it's bigs stealing from bigs now. The windows of time to steal other people's money is very Short. You have to be nimble flexible and unemotional.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNnNiYIXDIg&feature=g-all-u&context=G26381a6FAAAAAAAAAAA

 

[don't]

2/3rds of each days market action is the "big boys", hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds, endowment/college funds. Those people can MOVE the market. You go against them at your peril. However, you can often "piggyback" on what they are doing, because they hold so much of a given stock that it takes them several days to get into or out of it, and you can see that activity on the ticket tape, if you know what to watch for. Then, if you know what to do about it, you can make fairly certain profits.

There are also relationships in between some equities. For instance, when oil goes up, so does cotton, usually. Cause as nylon, etc, go up in price, people switch to cotton based garments. Transportation price increases drive up certain other prices, pretty quickly, etc.