Capitalogix: March 2013

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March 2013

March 10, 2013

A View From the Top - The Dow Makes New Highs

The Dow Made New Highs!

Wait, you don't care ... neither do a lot people.

Why? Pick your poison: 1. Distribution days are piling up. 2. Short-term volatility and correlation are picking up. 3. Dividend-paying, defensive stocks (consumer staples) are leading the market. 4. The deterioration among momentum stocks as a group has accelerated. 5. Momentum divergences are showing up in charts. 6. Or, perhaps, it is because Central Banks are propping things up.

Regardless, things have been moving higher ... and that is the market you have to trade.

Hold on; that isn't true. While there have been lots of headlines about the Equity Markets, that hasn't been the whole story this year. There are lots of other markets to trade.

The chart shows the top-ten performing markets, ranked by weekly performance, for the past few months. The data is color coded based on sector. The first column posts the current week's open performance followed by six columns of the most recent weekly market performance.

Click this link to view monthly, quarterly, and yearly views of this data.

Posted at 02:36 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Market Commentary, Trading | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 09, 2013

Here Are Some Links for Your Weekend Reading

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

Shared Wisdom: Thoughts From Some of the Industry’s Best VCs. (PandoDaily)
How Slot Machines Raise Our Hopes, Even When We’re Losing. (NYTimes)
Finding Value in Information Super-Abundance. (Economist)
How Nate Silver Got It Right. It's not how much data you have, it's what you do with it. (NYBooks)
Big Data Can Tell By Your Tweets If You’re a Psychopath. (GlobalMail)

Trading Links:

Small Hedge Funds Outdo Elite Rivals. (FT)
What If They Held a Bull Market and No One Came? Disinterest in the Dow's new high. (WS&T)
Buffett Picks Douglas Kass as His 'Bear' for Berkshire’s Annual Meeting. (Dealbook)
Could North Korea Really Nuke the United States? Threat of a "Preemptive Nuclear Attack" (TW)
As Budget Cuts Loom, Austerity Kills Off Government Jobs. What effect will that have on the economy? (NYTimes)

Posted at 03:47 PM in Books, Business, Current Affairs, Ideas, Just for Fun, Market Commentary, Trading, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 05, 2013

Check-Out the "People Are Awesome 2013" Video

Watch this video. Lots of it is amazing ... Some of it is inspiring.

You will witness flips, jumps, catches and feats that defy imagination (and certainly logic).

What type of person thinks, 'I want to do that' ?

To see which of the segments might be fake, click here.

Posted at 02:01 PM in Games, Just for Fun, Science, Sports | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 02, 2013

Measuring Market Opportunity with the Trend Level Indicator

A big part of successful trading is to identify what is working, while it is working, and to seize the opportunity while it is available.

The opportunity can be demonstrated using a sailboat analogy. The stronger and longer the wind blows the faster and further the sailboat should move. Conversely, in the absence of wind, we wouldn't expect movement. The best sailboat in the world is not going to go anywhere without some sort of wind.

Expanding the analogy, it is normal for winds to be blowing in most markets (trends) and occasionally for there to be strong winds in some markets (sustained trends).

Here is a chart showing the current Trend Levels for 40 markets.

Click here to see a yearly market performance comparison.

Note that while some high profile markets have been in an up-trend, there are more and bigger down-trending markets at the bottom of the chart.

In general, Trend Level ("TL") values greater than +5 indicate the presence of a noteworthy up move (or up-trend) and TL values less than -5 indicates the presence of a noteworthy down move (or down-trend) in the markets.