Greece with Media versus Volume and Technical Analysis

Very nice day. If you take a look at my Sunday's post (See "Volatility" post on may 2, 2010) and you will understand why I am in a good mood.

In my Sunday's post I wrote "Taking into account volatility, I would assume that the odds are on the side of the development of a correction down. Big bullish money flow since the end of February 2010 has pushed the stock market into overbought condition and it is in the favor of correction down." and it could look skeptical yesterday, yet, today it is completely another story.

It was interesting to watch financial news today. News always can find an "explanation" of event. If the market goes down the media states that investors are disappointed by FED keeping rates unchanged (if the rates stay unchanged it tells that the economy cannot afford higher rates). If the market goes up media states that investors are happy that FED keeps rates unchanged (low rates stimulate economy). There are always bad and there are always good news on the stock market. Media's job is to pick up news that fit the current market movement, which should not be very difficult, especially taking into account that it is done after the fact. In this way they always look smart and professional and they are "never wrong".

Today media blame Greece financial situation about stock market drop. Common, Greece has been all over the media over the last half of year and state that investors became worried about Greece today (not yesterday and not a month ago) is funny.

The market went down because it was overbought. Over the last two weeks I repeatedly mentioned about increasing volatility and high volume as an indication of coming changes. Whoever (from big institutional investors) was worried about "Greece" have left the market within the last two weeks. If you check the index volume (NYSE volume, S&P 500 volume, DJI volume and especially Russell 2000 volume) you will see it clearly. Now we see only a result of institutional traders' actions over the past two weeks.

P.S. Volume indicators continue to be my favorite tools in technical analysis.

Index Technical Analysis

Another week of almost flat market is behind. The Dow Jones Industrials is only 1.7% up from the previous week close, the Nasdaq 100 index gained 1.7% up as well and the S&P 500 index moved only 1.3% up from the previous week close. It would be wrong to say that this is a positive market; as well it would be incorrect to call this market Bearish. Starting from the April 2, 2009 the DJI index is in almost flat market (see my previous "S&P 500 Chart" report on April 25, 2009). The S&P 500 index did start to move side-way on April 9, 2009 - almost a month ago as well. The Nasdaq 100 index that was less affected by the recession (no financial stock in this index listing) was one of the most Bullish indexes, yet, still almost flat.

So what is going on the stock market from the technical analysis point of view? The stock market has been extremely oversold in all terms during the recent recession. In additions many of the stocks (companies), because of the crisis in the financial sector, were traded below its actual value (they were under evaluated). As a result we had strong recovery movement in period from February 9, 2009 until April 9, 2009. Any strong movement up leads the market into at least short-term oversold condition when the first wave of the investors who wanted to invest into underpriced stocks become exhausted and the second wave of the investors is not coming very fast to keep up-trend moving. For further healthy recovery the stock market needs to be released from these oversold conditions, attract more investors and that is why healthy bullish market supposes to have corrections.

We had one month of up-move and now we have one month of side-move. The same as last week I would say that I’m still in bullish mood, still I may consider possibility of some correctional movement down. Even if my technical analysis is correct and we see drop down, I would not expect it to be strong and prolonged in the time, but rather shallow and short lived.

There are several factors that make me believe in that:

1. Over the last month, by looking on the short-term index charts I may say that according to my short-term technical analysis the indexes very actively reacted on every (even small) volume surge to the index downside by immediate reversal up-move.
2. From the same short-term technical analysis I may say that there were number of occasion when bearish signals were ignored and price continued to move flat or up.
3. The stock market started to ignore negative news. Even we hear and see every day complains about swine flu and Chrysler bankruptcy and TV financial "gurus" are making statements that it negatively affects the market – we still have not seen any strong movement down.

This is one of the characteristic of the long-term bullish market when the majority of investors ignore bearish signals and negative news. In opposite every positive news and bullish signal attract investors to come back into the market and start to invest by buying.

Advance Decline

As a rule I do not make any posts during the week. Yet, today I witness interesting situation. S&P 500 advance decline oscillator and ratio were not as negative as it supposed to be during such index slide. The same was in the DOW sector.

Very nice volume in the middle of today’s trading session and very nice recovery right after that…

It was funny to read financial news today. Over the last few months the news tried to put in the head of investors the fact that the market moves down because of high oil prices. Today, when the oil was down and market was down – the media has found another explanation to the market slide and surprise – IT WAS NOT OIL. Maybe at the end the high oil price is not a reason of the market down move? Or maybe we should \never trust media and never based our trades on the media analysis of the stock market.