Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Where's the Beef?

Who hasn't trotted out that old TV catch phrase?

Thursday, the market fell hard on light volume. Today is it rallying rather well on even worse volume. You tell me if this is good enough data to analyze or is it GIGO - garbage in, garbage out?

This is an odd chart - hourly bars of NYSE volume in histogram format - I use to see not only how much volume is happening but when. Match that up to price action and you know if the buying or selling was urgent.

What I see is confusion and lack of interest in the market.

4 comments:

Michael Kahn said...

Update. The final hour of the day saw a huge pickup in volume. The total day was still sub-average but the pickup in late volume is clear. And what was happening during that final hour? The S&P gave up 2/3 of the day's gain.

Amalan said...

I was going to say that the last hour of yesterday's decline might have been more of those wanting to protect their quaterly performance numbers, and the true direction of the market would be established starting today, April 1. Well, we are in the last hour again, and it seems the market is confirming an upward bias.

The question is what's the next big blunder by the Govt that will cause the market to turn down again. At this point, corporations have made all the blunders they possibly can :-)

Michael Kahn said...

Never underestimate the power for blunder.

I think this market is too unstable to see the upward bias. Haven't ruled it out but more proof please!

Unknown said...

The gov is manipulating a series of short squeezes. The first strike was the fed announcing it was printing money to buy long-term bonds. The second was the announcement of a new bank bailout on options expiration day. The third will likely be a return of the uptick rule.

Once this last shoe falls, there won't be any reason for being long. I hate to bring up the "F" word, fundamentals, but it's hard to imagine a bull market as long as real estate is going down. The case/shiller index out tuesday showed no pause in the weakening there.