Phantasmix Stock Market Blog

SPX, S&P 500, looks oversold and the stochastics are where most of the previous bounces happened over the past year, except once. During the first correction there was still lingering fear, March wasn’t a very distant memory in people’s minds. I think these days most are inclined to buy on the dip after many months of steady advances.

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I watch the WallStJ. buying on strength and selling on weakness lists daily (literally, even when not trading). While it’s not a very reliable short-term predictor of anything (I’m sorta lying, I’ve actually made some good day trades based on large selling or buying volume, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a good predictor for the next day, let’s put it that way), longer term it’s been shown to mean something.

Over the past 5-6 weeks there’s been significant selling on strength on the indices and some big individual stocks, almost every single UP day with only a few exceptions. The total selling on SPY is somewhere between $1.5-2B. There was one big buying day on weakness day and it was close to $400MM, maybe $350MM, I forgot. The net is still a large amount of selling. Over this last little sell-off there hasn’t been any meaningful buying on weakness, none at all really.

$TRIN, the Arms index has been running over 1.0 quite a bit lately as well, meaning in the overall market there have been more shares on the ask than on the bid.

In conclusion, this sell-off may catch everyone off guard, but it’s not based on much more than “more selling than buying”. I don’t have very sophisticated tools for tracking that.

I do have March puts and April calls, so yeah, I want to get rid of them profitably in that order however, I didn’t make up all of the above. And I admit, the daily chart IS OVERSOLD. The weekly is still overbought, in fact, has barely budged.

In the future, very near future, I will be studying arbitrage trading closer, as I’m now much more interested in making money than getting the direction right. I may still try and guess the direction, purely out of interest, but don’t want the $$$ to depend on my opinion which from March to July was way off.

OMG, BRK.B is going to split, 50-to-1 and join S&P! That’ll be $66/share at today’s price.

Warren Buffett is likely about to orchestrate one of the biggest changes in years to the financial structure of his company.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is widely expected to approve a 50-to-1 share split of its Class B shares on Wednesday, a move tied to its planned purchase of the railroad giant Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.

With the split, trading volume will likely increase, and that could attract a new group of bigger and faster-trading investors. The B shares closed Friday at $3,247, a lofty price that limited the kind of investors who bought the stock to mostly those with …

Source: WSJ

Corrections on SPX have been getting more and more shallow.

(SPY: 134.361 -0.74%) touched 13ema today, and closed above it. Wonder if this is all the reaction we’ll get this time as well. Stochastics are still very overbought, and I’m still betting on a larger drop, holding March SPY puts.

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