May 29th...small day

I did some trading today....I am finding that "trading" does not equate to placing trades as much as studying the market activity and getting a feel for where the trades are.

This was a funny day and I only placed one trade, made a few bucks as I caught a 20cent move in SDS as the S&P came off of the midweek high. I think that I am trying to hold onto my profits from yesterday too tightly. Get a little cash and I don't want to part with it so I was watching for perfect setups to enter...that led me to miss some nice trades, I tracked a 25cent trade in SSO and I see a couple of others since. Having said that it is a strange Friday as volume was down, end of the month so I don't regret not being active.

I did work on my audible alert system for Esignal. I now can set a fast and slow SMA to alert me with one sound as the fast crosses upward and another as it crosses downward. I plan on using the 10 SMA for a pre-alert, the 15 SMA as the setup and the 30 as the slow SMA all in the TICK data. The next pullback (or rally) into the opposing 100/195 high low average band will be the trigger, no alert and I would like to get this setup to place the arrows for each step. I actually missed a nice trade due to dinking with the arrow on the TICK chart instead of just watching the activity.

I noticed a strange pattern in the TICK data candles today, one that I have noted on other days also. The candles are sparse and there is not much "beef" as the TICK swings from one range to another. Higher volatility usually accompanies this along with fairly tight ranging and less predictable price activity. I plan on going back and determining what the circumstances are but I think that it will have to do with volume and expectations coming off of a certain types of preceding days.

Interestingly this was typical of the TSX and the related TICK data. It looked very similar and I recall it not being a very good indicator.

I don't have charts to illustrate this right now but I wanted to make a note of it.

Jeff.