Thursday, November 20, 2008

Stocks Continue The Selloff With Volume Finally Picking Up On The Selling

Today can be called nothing other than nasty as most of the indexes made round trips back to either six-year or eleven-year lows, following a nasty selloff that came on very heavy volume. Volume picked up on every exchange as finally some signs of panic selling hit the market.

This selling took the markets off around 5% to 6% and a lot of stocks were just walloped. Now while I have continued to talk about the nasty downtrend this market is in and how well my shorts have been doing: top short holdings and total returns: IPHS 44% POT 65% GGB 72% SBAC 66% CYT 69% MOS 74% CETV 89% CPRT 28% AZO 24% RDK 17% AMX 49% PLCE 38% CAJ 34% SPG 52% CEO 51% AAPL 50% ENB 24% K 18% ARB 67% AMSG 20% SPW 77% RIMM 58% LLL 37% CEDC 65% APD 55% OKE 46% SDA 80% TITN 59% PAA 28%). I don't believe I have seen the market in such a bleak condition in a long time and think I need to tell you about the lack of bullish items out there.

To start it all off only 3% of stocks in the market are above the 200 day moving average and to make it worse only 4% of those stocks are above their 50 day moving averages. I personally have never seen numbers this low on both indexes. If I have, I can not remember it. To top that off, the amount of stocks hitting a new 52-week high compared to stocks hitting a new 52-week low really showed some extreme readings today. Now while we have had 4,700 new lows at one point just last month which signaled over half the market making new lows, there were still more than just one stock hitting new highs. Today, however, there was only one stock that hit a new high and there were 2,300+ stocks hitting new 52-week lows. This is just an incredible number.

What makes this selloff worse for bulls is also the fact that there is almost nothing setting up out there as possible future longs. Until yesterday and today, there was at least two handfuls left of stocks that looked like they could be longs in the future. After the past two days, it has become apparent that only COGT, a stock I am long, CWT, and HTX are the only stocks that still have that beautiful green to max green BOP, strong accumulation, and price above the 50 day moving average. This is such a low amount of possible future longs that I am just amazed that this can actually be happening.

The good news on the other side of this is my shorts and those great returns they are giving me. The only problem is that I did not have the time or the "near-perfect" setups to help me get more than 20%, on margin, short. Other subscribers with more guts than me have gains between 60% and 120%. Axman, Wutan, Author Ego, Mjjacobs, and myself all have strong gains of at least 30% and I have many other members with gains or small losses. Axman is by far the greatest of the great and that should be no surprise to those that know that he has been around since 1987. That kind of experience, as you can tell, has paid off. Now, if someone like Axman can get a 120% gain in a market that is down over 50% from the highs of last year, wouldn't you want to make the commitment to be the same trader/investor that he is? I know I want to and I know that I will. When I have the years of experience that this great trader has, I know I will get the returns he does.

My problem right now is that I did not expect this market to turn down so fast so I thought I had time to wait for better setups and I did not think it would be this bad this fast. Thus I missed out on really exploiting my gains to the fullest (which would be a 150% gain with the individual returns in my shorts) and now am waiting for a new bull market to start for me to get maxed out to the long side with the new CANSLIM leading stocks.

I will probably be waiting a while as the markets have E ratings on the NYSE, DJIA, and SP 500, a D- rating on the Nasdaq, and C+ ratings on the IBD 100 and IBD 85-85. Until these accumulation/distribution ratings in IBD hit A or B, it is definitely smarter to stay on the short side or if you are new or have taken a lot of your short profits to be heavily in cash. Nothing is wrong with being long cash right now. Since the US Dollar took out the 50 and 200 DMA the future alone is up 18%. I do not play the Dollar index futures but I assume in the futures market you could have made a lot of money by playing the Dollar like that.

This market is getting harder to handle day by day but I know the more we selloff and the higher the volume gets, the closer we get to a bottom. With that kind of positive outlook and a history of getting some amazing returns in fresh bull markets, there is no way I can give up on the market right here. I might be a little down, but I am never out.

Today was an incredibly tough day for me as I had a lot of little "life problems" happen left and right today. At least my shorts are taking a little care of me, even if the market isn't taking care of anyone. This is why the biggest gamble ever is buy and hold: F and GM. What a joke that whole story is.

This is a site designed to make you a TON of money in bull and bear markets. This is not a site to disect news and the automobile industry. All I can tell you is that I believe in extremely low taxes, free competition. little government regulation, and more incentives to have more IPOs come public. If that makes me a staunch Capitalist, then whatever and so be it. I know what it will take to turn this market around and I guarantee it isn't bailouts. On that note, have a great day/afternoon/evening/night and I will see you after the next closing bell.

Aloha from the beautiful island of Maui where traffic gets more and more congested every day.

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