Couple days to reflect, and Market Overview for Apr 9 and 13

I hope everyone had a great weekend and spent a wonderful holiday with their families.

If you read my blog over the weekend, you'd know that I was a little miffed as to why anyone would retweet a link as their own, especially only a couple of minutes after the original tweet. But hey, perhaps it was a coincidence, an oversight or whatever. We are not here to cry over spilled milk. We are here to make money, share ideas, and most of all learn. I know I've learned a lot in the short time I've been on Twitter and met a lot of very smart and very friendly people. I believe I have some ideas to offer as well, and I hope to do just that with this blog and Twitter.

On Thursday, eSignal's data feed was down most of the day - I think it came up around 12:30pm. It was another difficult day to trade as we gapped up pretty big on the (surprisingly) strong earnings pre-announcement by WFC. The only signals I received from my system (which I could see after eSignal was online) occurred at around 10:45am for a countertrend move, and at around 12:00pm for a continuation of the trend. I did not take any trades, as by the time I was back online, I would have had to chase the entry point - something that is a no-no in my plan.

Today, I got 2 signals on ES (and SPY), the first one at around 10:15am. This was a tough signal to trade, as it would have required me place a wide stop on my position, so, I decided to take half a position. Also, it was a long signal, and I am being very careful with anything long right now. After a gut-wrenching move back down, the position started to move in my favor around noon and finally cracked the opening range highs for a continued move up. I ended up scalping 50c and 75c from my SDS short. My second signal was also a long in ES at around 3:15pm which I decided not to take.

GS announced earnings after hours and surprise - it was another record earnings. I guess the AIG short must have worked nicely for them. Stock was all over the place in AH, and I believe ended down a couple of points.

I have been doing some research on stocks for long and short positions, and my shortlist of longs is almost non-existent right now. And I think it is too early to short - I will need some confirmation before jumping in. We are coming into some stiff resistance on a lot of stocks, and the 200MA is lurking above for most stocks.

Good luck and stay patient.