Bring on the Turkey

Thanksgiving is the best holiday. Period. No gifts. Turkey and football. Excessive celebration of said holiday will be priority numero uno next week. As for markets I'll play defense.

Trading should be thin. Hopefully boring too. I've got stuff to do.

The consensus is that stocks will be bought based on the calender. Meanwhile the fundamentals are deteriorating around us. The weak bull case may win out in the short term. We could drift higher. Or not.

There are some stocks worth buying. Utilities and other defensive sectors look good. However, the warm fuzzy holiday market, if that's what we get, isn't likely to last long.

Full Disclosure: I hate Christmas.

Looking for the Rollover

One sector I want to watch closely and participate in from the short side is commercial real estate. These stocks have held up pretty well relative to other real estate/finance stocks. I'm looking for the rollover. Be careful these babies bounce hard.

VNO is my favorite at the moment. If you look at the daily chart it's flirting with support.

There are a bunch of these stocks that have similar patterns though. So you have other choices. SLG, for instance, an old Ken Heebner favorite.

Agnostic

Feels like the easy money has been made on the short side. It may get a bit more complicated from here (in the short term anyway). I could make the case for a rally or another 300 DOW points of downside. I'm sort of agnostic. I'll try to stick with my shorts that are working but I want to be less aggressive on a Friday. My watch list is thin today. Two words: capital preservation.

Again, rally or no, there isn't much I want to buy here.

However, at some point here in the near future, I think silver is going to go nuts to the upside. It's marking time here. I feel no immediate urgency to add to my position but somewhere in this neighborhood is where I want to do so. The point is not to get too cute trying to buy at just the right time. Maybe I'll scale into some more SLV starting today. Maybe not. Just know that at some point the SLV is going to $200. I really want to be on that train in a big way. I've been waiting a long time for this breakout.

I remain short financials. Again, as we have observed previously, the market correction over the last couple days was led by financials. This has happened repeatedly. They are acting as a tell on the market as a whole. Continue to watch them.

Perspective

My watchlist for today has 44 short candidates and 16 long candidates. Hmmm. It's a shame too. I'd like to be more balanced, and not leaning against this market so heavily, but the only candidates that really excite me are on the short side.

At midday the market seems to be rolling over here. Metals are getting creamed too. Should be an interesting afternoon. I guess I'll be rooting for more downside.

Where's the Fear?

I see none. AAPL up a couple bucks. AMZN upgraded. Buying the dip is apparently a difficult habit to break.

Late Day Plunge, Nice for a Change

No 2:30 jam-job into the close today folks. Nope. Today we plunged. Made my day.

What I saw today was a lot of stocks that had already made their moves back to overhead resistance (formerly support). Therefore, low risk shorting opportunities were abundant. And still are, some of them.

We made several attempts at the magical 1490 level on the SPX. The bulls were lobbing hand grenades and the bears were armed with kitchen scissors. Sure enough the bulls ended the day origami.

Metals were strong. Dollar spent the day trading lower before closing flat. Yen was off 1%.

Everything basically worked for me today. Even the lottery ticket (short AAPL) paid off. The balance of the week should be very interesting. Option expiration Friday. Heads up folks.

Testing 1,2

Oh. Oh. Oh. I figured out how to put an image or chart on my page. What's up now?! Get up Estero! That only took 6 months. Bottom line is, and I often admit it, I have the mechanical aptitude of a 14-year-old girl. I'm pretty excited even though I'm probably still doing it wrong.

Thanks to Stockcharts.

Update

Couldn't resist. Took a position in the SDS this morning below 53. Small position. Limited risk. We get a close above 1500 on the SPX and I'm long gone. If it goes my way however the position will be increased.

Starting to dip my toe in on the short side again. Have lots of ideas.

Key Level

1490 on the SPX. That's the bull/bear line in the sand. Here goes...

Day of Massacre Redux

This time it was the shorts who got ambushed. DOW up 319. NDX up 89. Eighty-frickin'-nine. Wow. Absolutely green across the board.

This sort of volatility is associated with bears, not bulls. After all the selling we were due for the big snap back.

Today actually hurt. I got smaller again and have enough buying power to choke a horse. Sure there was money on the long side but I'm not interested in that here.

Maybe this is the big bottom here and we vault to new highs. That would be surreal. I'd be wrong and late to the big party. Oh well. I'll make money long if I have to. Nothing wrong with being wrong. Your average trader is wrong half the time. Key to being wrong: admit it and move on. You have to have a plan that allows for you to be wrong. Live to fight another day.

Anyway, if new highs aren't in the cards, I'm happy to sit out this bounce. We'll see. I can't not play the game so I'm sure to deploy capital soon enough.

Fleckenstein's headline today was great: "Market upgraded from buy to grab!"

Mo-Mo No Mo'

APPL down $11.61 (7%),

RIMM down $10.62 (9.38%),

and wait for it. Wait for it. Yep,

GOOG down $31.90 (4.8%).

Mo-Mo names are broken. Hence the weakness in the NDX.

Day of Massacre

Yep. The metals got hammered. I was waiting for that. Classic. When they decide to turn against you the metals will rip out your heart, rape your daughter and burn your whole village down to the ground, like the Janjaweed. Don't make oversized bets. I've learned the hard way.

For those that are long the GLD (down 4%) or the SLV (down 6% +/-) today was painful indeed. I trimmed those positions into strength last week but still got pummelled. Mining shares were brutalized as well.

Then we had a fake market rally today with the DOW up triple digits at one point only to unmask itself into the close where we actually ended red to the tune of 55 pts. I covered some shorts this morning as I took down risk across the board.

Now long almost nothing. Some metals and the DBA. Sold COGN this morning when I was throwing things into the fire. Bought it Friday afternoon. Ha. Accept luck as luck and move on.

Still somewhat aggressively net short. But now I have lots of ammunition and virtually no leverage. Just feel like we could go either way here and I have very little conviction. My gut says that the market is going to crack but we could also get a violent (Santa Claus?) rally off of these lows.

On one hand I fear getting left behind on the short side if we go lower here and now. On the other, there will plenty of money to be made once (if) the market breaks. As a younger man I would have a hard time standing back from a position in fear that I would "miss it". Now I realize that there are opportunities every day, every week and the most important thing is to just "stay in the game".

My advice to you? Stay in the game. Peace.