At my daughter's school this morning, this was on the easel. You know it's got to be Stanford/Palo Alto when one of the items is "Maybe bears eat tofu."
I confess I get bugged when analysts and/or bloggers that I frequent turn bullish. I feel betrayed somehow. But that reveals a terrible confirmation-seeking bias. One shouldn't simply seek out opinions agreeing with their own. I think it's more useful to seek out opinions in absolutely contradiction to your own, in order to challenge it.
Having said that, if there's one chart I'm looking at now that has the "bull bell" ringing, it's this one. To me, this is a pretty compelling argument for an upsurge in the NASDAQ in the coming weeks.
This morning, strangely enough, the chart that induced me to sell off my index puts (at great profits, thanks so much) was the FXI. It seemed to be bottoming pretty hard. At the time, it was actually down, but it was dancing just above those two lines you see (Fib and trend).
The $CZH agrees with this (temporary, at least) bullish prognosis for the Chinese markets.
I'm not seeing any screaming-bearish charts. Best case, I'm seeing "middle of the road stuff", like the all-important IWM. The RUT is the only index on which I have a put position, and it's not particularly big.
I bought 8 calls today. One of them was MER. Investment banks are looking a bit bullish.
The also-very-important S&P 500 is also middle-of-the-road. I don't doubt the medium/long term bearishness of these charts. But I am very suspicious of the short-term.
As I mentioned a day or two ago, the SOX is looking pretty bullish to me. The options on it stink, so I wound up buying calls on the SMH instead.
And one specific stock in the $SOX group I bought calls on was KLAC.
I've still got 63 equity puts and 1 index put, but I've got 8 equity calls. I might back away farther on the put side if the market shows more strength. I might even get index calls soon. Don't hate me because I may be temporarily bearish. I'd rather be nimble than dogmatic.