Day one...or not.

Yesterday was to be the first real planned trading day with my TFSA account as I saw Tuesday night that it had been linked to my platform and all my funding is in place.

Big plans.

I do work for a living but have very flexible hours when I need to. So in the interest of concentrating on trading I had planned on heading home at 0900h...it's a ten minute drive...and that would give me time enough to setup my computers and do some other at home things before the market opened.

I had one fellow call in sick, so I had to juggle the day...then I had another call in with car troubles (-26C)...more juggling. At that point I decided that I was not meant to trade today...but I persisted and left on time only to be stymied by the markets.

TLM yesterday, the pivot points are today's setup so they do not apply.

There was one decent trade early on as the SPTEN (and TLM) dropped and HED climbed. I am not comfortable with the ETF trading yet so I let it go to watch only for long positions with TLM. There were quite a few PP200 setups that looked promising on the chart around the 1000h mark but the quotes were telling another story. They were screaming "DON"T MAKE THE TRADE" for a solid 30 minutes as the price seemed perched on a launching pad and bumping along what looked like a good resistance level...only to fall through it again.

I shut down and went back to work after having placed no trades.

Long trades could have been entered at a few places but none really followed PP200...until after the 200sma caught up with the price. There were three trades after that, but of course I am not usually trading the afternoon.

Interesting note about the quotes. I am using only level 1 so I cannot tell who is placing the bids or asks only how many are at a particular price. Normally when there is a very high bid volume at a particular price just below the trading price it can indicate strong buying pressure. Then, as the price gets a little lower the bids break out and start climbing and the asks start moving away and the the bids follow. The trick is to watch the bids under this high volume bid. If there is no real depth then there is no support for the price.

Today the high volume bid did not budge. It ranged from 150 to 300 shares at any given moment, some trades broke ranks and edged the price higher but as the price started trading at the bid the price did not rise, it fell through as soon as the bids were exhausted. A false bottom.

Jeff.