Thursday, April 15, 2010

Quick Update

The previous SKF trade was stopped out last week at 18.39 as the markets have continued steadily higher.

There still has been no oversold signal from the model used to enter the SPXU trade and no overbought signal from the sentiment readings on natural gas, so I am holding those trades.

I don't have time to post charts right now, but sentiment is excessively bullish and then some on multiple time frames. So this should mean a pullback very soon here, but when it means the end of this leg up I don't know.

For instance yesterday the equity put/call ratio was 0.32 which is extraordinarily low. The lowest since early 2004 around the holidays. The 3/5 day equity put/call ratio that I track shows a possible complacency spike seeing as the ratio is 1.5 standard deviations (contains about 80% of data) from its mean.

Also the 5/63 day equity put/call ratio is at 0.73 meaning that the 5 day ratio is 27% lower than the 63 day ratio. This is the biggest spread in several years. For mean reverting data, those two averages should be similar, and when they are 20% or so different, you often see a significant inflection point.

There are too many things to even go over right now as far as these type of extremes go.

I still think grains look attractive if looking for things to buy (GRU, JJG, DBA, etc). I still think buying or holding significant portions of stocks on an investment basis at this stage is not the way to go. Also I would still not be expecting bonds to be a good investment, though on a relative basis to stocks, they are undervalued looking at them as I usually do. The trend in the US dollar still looks to be up, so holding cash should not hurt if unsure what to do on an investment basis.