Friday, June 27, 2014

Price action has been so lackluster lately that stocks seem unable to overcome the faint gravitational pull of weekly options that are due to expire today. Unless some lame excuse-for-news comes along to goose traders back to consciousness, expect them to end the week drooling, much as they've been doing all week.

I'm raising my 21.435 rally target by 15 cents, to 21.585, based on the chart shown.  The futures have been head-butting the midpoint resistance all week, but if they can close above it the target will become an odds-on bet for the near-term. If it is exceeded by more than a few ticks on first contact, that would raise the immediate ceiling to 21.675.

I've reproduced a graph of yesterday's pointless swoon in the E-Mini to show how difficult it would have been to trade the move. Minutes before the opening bell, the futures head-faked above the 3-point range they'd probed tediously for 11 eleven hours; then they took a hellacious, 16-point dive in under 25 minutes. In retrospect, it's clear that there were few bears aboard to profit from the histrionics on display here, only bulls mistakenly loaded to the gills. At the end of the day, the September contract had recouped nearly the entire loss. But the move was so labored that it could not properly be described as a bounce.  Rather, it was more like a slog, so choppy that the canny day trader would have needed to get his or her brain working like a pogo stick to make hay.  As for the subtle hooks we use to get aboard on-the-cheap, camouflage-style, there were none -- not even on the one-minute bar chart. We won't pretend to have any sage advice concerning where this rabid weasel might be headed as the week draws to a close, but you might do better to track it for its entertainment value rather than as a vehicle to day-trade.