It appears as though the sp500 is going to close above the high of Monday of this week today. I see no point in switching back to a long signal at this point and therefore neutral seems more appropriate.
My take is that the 1300 range on the sp500 is going to be the next major battle line that must be won in order for the market to trade higher again. I think if and when we get to 1300 there should be some type of retracement from there. This may coincide with a pull back to the bottom of the trading channel we are currently trading in.
So there may not be another BestOnlineTrades Long signal for quite some time. It will depend on how long it takes the sp500 to get back to the bottom of its channel and how deep the reaction is off of the 1300 level.
I still think there is plenty of upside as far as the indices are concerned, but for the purposes of issuing a new BOT long signal the risk reward for issuing a new signal now does not make any sense.
So neutral for now and wait and see mode.
I do have to say that the strength in the market is quite remarkable.
If I had to guess maybe the next more substantial turn in the market would coincide with the USA state of the union speech? It seems as though the election cycle and Washington has quite a few puppet strings on this market anyway, so it would seem only appropriate for a turn to come at that time perhaps as a ‘sell the news’ type event. Just a little bit of healthy speculation on my part.
With the market move higher in the first 3 trading days of 2011, it will be interesting to see investor sentiment indicators this wkend in Barron’s. Last week Consensus Index was 71% Bullish.
We get a sneak peek tomorrow / Thursday morning with the Aall Investor Sentiment Index. It was at 51.6% bullish last week from 63.3% bullish the week before. I am nervously waiting to see what it will be when they post this weeks results in the wee hours of tomorrow morning. The WSJ indicated that Aall has, i think, an 8 week moving average of about 52% which is the highest such moving average in 8 years or so. I hope the bullish sentiment in this latest week ending today moves back to about 57% or so but this indicator is extremely difficult to predict, in my opinion
I think this market is on borrowed time, and BORROWED DOLLARS!
Aall Investor Sentiment Index for week ended 1/5/2011 is 55.9% Bullish, 18.3 % Bearish. Another way to look at it, is that 3 times as many bulls as bears!