Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Intraday Sentiment and a Little Update



* Intraday Sentiment - Here's a look at the equity put/call ratio on a five minute basis (bottom chart) and a comparable chart for the ES futures (top chart). Put buying expanded early in the morning, but prices held above their overnight lows, suggesting underlying strength. Note also the dramatic expansion of put buying relative to calls around 1 PM CT, after the market had been selling off. This was a nice tell for profit taking on the short side, as price stopped moving lower despite increasing bearishness. Looking at option volume intraday provides a nice window on very short-term speculative sentiment.

* New Outlet for TraderFeed - Selected posts from this blog have appeared on the Seeking Alpha site for a while now. Starting today, selected posts will also appear on the Morningstar site, as part of their community building. Here's the page featuring their other blogs. My sense is that Morningstar does a responsible, quality job of providing information to individual investors (as opposed to short-term traders); hence my willingness to participate in their community.

* A Little Somethin' Somethin' - The Twitter Trader feature is really a blog within the TraderFeed blog, providing links to articles on market-moving themes, summarizing indicator data, and providing heads up on the day's major economic reports. I notice over 500 traders now subscribe; here's the page for free subscription. In honor of the 500 milestone, note that I posted one of the historical trading patterns in a Twitter "tweet" yesterday. I'll be doing a little more of that going forward, as not every pattern that I observe merits its own separate blog post. The last five "tweets" appear on the blog site under "Twitter Trader".

* New Book Chapter - The two-volume reference set on Psychiatry just came out, with a chapter on brief therapy written by yours truly with two colleagues from my med school in Syracuse. This follows my brief therapy chapter in the recent Textbook of Psychiatry published by the American Psychiatric Association. Much of the applied psychology that appears in my trading books and in this blog is derived from research and practice in brief therapy.

* Forex Expo - One of my rare public appearances will occur in September, at the Forex Trading Expo in Las Vegas. I was impressed by the organizer's insistence that the presentations be non-commercial and informative. My presentation will provide a window on some of the new material covered in the book I'm currently writing.

* Coaching Questions - I'm getting an increasing number of emails from traders asking coaching questions (i.e., requests for advice re: trading problems). Alas, I can't respond to all those emails, but I will be selecting a few related topics to address in blog posts in the next couple of days in hopes of helping as many traders as possible.
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