S&P 500 Shorter-Term Chart

Those who follow my blog should remember the "S&P 500 Chart" post on May 24, 2009 where I draw the resistance line break of which would signal the end of the flat market we saw in May 2009. It looks like, now, we are back in the bullish market - at least technical analysis of daily charts (1 bar = 1 day) is positive again after being negative for the biggest part of May. Still, I would encourage everybody to take a look at higher timeframe charts by themselves to see what market stage we are in. Even if you do not trade indexes, even if you do not-trade in mid- and long-term, in some cases it could be useful to have some picture about situation on the stock market. It may help you to august your personal trading strategy to the current sentiment.

Taking a look at shorter-timeframe chart (hourly chart: 1 bar = 1 hour) we may see mixed sentiment, yet, with bullish dominance (see S&P 500 chart below). When I mention hourly charts I assume 3-day and smaller trends. Majority of technical indicators on this chart have bar period setting less than 20 and multiplying it by 1 hour (bar time frame) you will have maximum 20 hour coverage which is about 3 trading sessions (one trading session is six and half hours long). However, the market is still volatile (see ATR, VIX and other volatility indicators) and I would not bet on this chart for longer than a day ahead. Furthermore, this chart should be monitored during the trading hours.



Overall, as I have already mentioned above, my technical analysis applied to hourly charts show dominance of bullish sentiment (see direction of arrows for each technical indicator). There are still two negative signs: declining SBV and declining Advance/Decline oscillator, however, SBV is almost flat and previous Adv/Decl red area is much bigger than the recent green one.