A Dang Good Year for AUDCAD … So Far!

If you bought the Australian dollar and simultaneously sold the Canadian dollar at the beginning of the year and you’re still positioned like that then you’re probably a pretty happy camper. That’s because year-to-date AUDCAD (Australian dollar vs. Canadian dollar) has jumped 1,000 PIPs – or 11.4%. And in the world of forex, that’s a huge move.

And having just tested its highest level in more than three years, we begin to wonder if this pair could be running out of gas. Buy-and-hold strategists will tell you the trend is your friend, so keep buying and holding. But we’ve got a different philosophy that keeps us asking: when is the trend not your friend? And when is the trend going to reverse and take you to the cleaners?

 

Right now may be one of those times … or it might not. But

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Impressive bounce off that 1260 level on the S&P. Like a magnet the market bounced to S&P 1275…. (thanks PPT) and away we go to 1280s. Reader Shax is happy and smug somewhere in Asia with his 100% long exposure. I just cannot see a break through that 1260 on the first attempt with all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men here to socialize the market, all over again. They have charts too and realize how important this level is. It’s going to take repeated attempts I believe, to break through their purchasing power.Frankly at this point we have 2 outcomes (a) crash i.e. a 10% drop in the markets (June) followed by even more rampant selling layered on top or (b) an oversold bounce.I wrote last week I was done for now with Ultrashort Financial (SKF) as …

Followers of Barry Ritzholz's TheBigPicture and Felix Salmon's Conde Nast Portfolio will have noticed the battle between the pro-market-technician and anti-market-technician stance of the respective authors. Unfortunately for Felix, using Jim Cramer as an example of a market technician at work does little to help his cause (Jim Cramer is many things, but market technician he is not). Felix's key point was Whenever you hear words like "overbought" or "oversold" or "momentum" or "support" or "resistance", it means that whatever you're hearing is garbage. But it also means that the person you're listening to has no idea what's about to happen, and is therefore resorting to the financial equivalent of astrology. In such cases, it's worth ignoring the message completely, but it's also worth having some serious thoughts about the messenger, too. Barry responded with a point-by-point blow as to benefits of using technical analysis can bring the ...

On May 21 I opened a position in Ultrashort Oil & Gas [May 21: Oil Looks Toppy to Me - Starting Ultrashort Oil & Gas (DUG)] I wroteThis type of run simply looks overextended and toppy to me - I believe sooner rather than later (probably within a week or two) we are going to see a sharp reversal in oil to the downside. And it will take the commodities with it. Things have now moved to purely speculative mode - who else is left to buy and who is not on this train? I doubt very many....I am going to buy Ultrashort Oil & Gas (DUG) as a "trade", not investment. This ETF has destroyed so many people but when it reverses I believe it will be powerful (this does not short oil directly but shorts a whole bunch of exploration companies) And ...

I received a few questions about the stocks I posted on Saturday. All of the stocks were found the old fashioned way, I manually search through hundreds of stocks each weekend to come up with a list of stocks to watch for the following week. I only used Finviz as an effective way to display those stocks. The process of how I find those stocks is explained thoroughly in Chapter 18 of my book. As for what do I look for as a trigger to enter a trade on those stocks, it is when the trends are aligned across multiple timeframes. For swing trades, I use the DAILY chart to identify a trade candidate, the 30 MINUTE timeframe to identify if there is a favorable risk/reward ratio and the 10/5/2 MINUTE timeframe to fine tune my analysis for entry points and to manage risk.