For all of last week, the event kept replaying itself over and over in my mind. Would I be in some kick-ass trade? Riding through Resistance as if I were the soldier dropping the nuke in "Dr. Strangelove"? Each day I kept thinking about the event as the pundits kept reminding me, "Will today be the day we finally break through 11,000?" As it turned out, because my Boss has told us horror stories, and as a rule I do not trade during the last 20 minutes, I completely missed it. Not only did I miss it, but being a Friday afternoon, I turned my trading monitor off and didn't find out about it until my Weekend Copy of the Wall Street Journal arrived in the mail.
Instead of some massive and unlikely rally, the reality is that there are a lot of factors holding the markets back. Some have even dubbed this a "Snail Rally," apparently due to the complete absence of the Retail Investors. Many folks are worried, given the beating these same equity markets doled out a little less than two years ago, but the beginning of Earnings season is also weighing in on the matter. Are investors waiting for Earnings? If a large number of companies report consistently positive earnings, will this cause the rally I so desperately want to participate in?
Undoubtedly this is a difficult environment to learn my craft in: extremely low volume and a very low reading on the "Fear Gauge" (a much cooler name than VIX). In a trading environment like today's, the general goal is to do mostly "Test" trades; even these were difficult to execute today. Given that I am becoming a Technical Analyst, I have no business making predictions, but let's all hope that an even larger rally is right around the corner.
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