Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Sentiment

Sentiment here is appropriate for a major bottom (no i am not talking about a ST bottom). What a contrast ? It was just 8 months ago when the chinese housewives were buying the Shanghai with both their hands and the Indian housewives went nuts, all plunging into the Reliance IPO when BSE was at 21000.

When S&P cracked 1380 back in January, i posted the LT sell on the S&P with a target of 1170+/-20. There were no talks about the implications of the U.S market breakdown. It was all about how the emerging markets were immune from the U.S developments. BSE was at 20,000+ and SSEC was somewhere around 5500 then. Now that the BSE is close to it's LT objective of 12300 and Shanghai now below 2000, stories about the death of U.S is appearing on the front pages of the asian newspapers, written by journalists who think AIG is an index and S&P a stock ! And mind you, the stories are appearing even on the asain regional newspaper frontpages !

Time to get bearish was 2 weeks back when the trend turned. At the tops and the middle of the trend, there are plenty of trendlines, forks, bollinger bands, fibonanci, pivots, etc to provide support and a slope to slip down on. When all supports are broken and there's nothing to hang on, then the raw fear takes over, like now. The crash topics take center stage. Newsletter writers warn their subscribers of the dangerous volatility and ask them to stay in cash (and you need to pay these newsletters folks to learn to stay in cash. Amazing !). Folks, it's nothing new here. I bet every major IT bottom has felt that way. Most typical of a 9 month cycle bottom.

Now this is neither an advise to bottom pick nor a passage about my knife-catching abilities. Just a sentiment read. I don't trade these bottoms. I am just not interested. I just scalp the volatility, beacuse unless one has the ability to take 50-100 SPX points drawdowns calmly, they have no business trying to establish positions here.

Time, Pattern and Price are ripe here for the completion of the first leg of the bear market. Now let the market speak....

1 comment:

dadoes said...

This seems like a 9/11 situation where fed intervention causes a multi-month rally.

We've had record volume levels and sentiment is at bearish extremes.

Everybody on the message boards seems to be using the rally as an opportunity to short. I don't see anybody but a few saying we rally for a bit here.