We are back in the Mercury Retrograde. The latest Mercury Retrograde started on December 10th and will conclude on December 30th. Time to be cautious of unannounced spikes and plunges.
Long time readers –all three of them – know that I have written about this celestial phenomenon and its impact on markets namely higher intra-day swings, breaking down of technical indicators especially chart patterns, surprise geo-political/economical events amongst others. Those articles are still relevant and I recommend you read them.
Here are the links:
- Overview of Mercury Retrograde and its potential impact on markets
- My quantitative analysis of the intra-day swings during all Mercury retrograde periods since 2006
A few salient summary points from above posts:
- Don’t rely too much on chart patterns during this time frame.
- My observation has been that in the second half of the period, Markets behave kind of opposite to how they were in the first few days of the period.
- These are better times for day trader due to the more than average intra-day swings. Show restraint if you are a position trader. Don’t extrapolate any trends as they could reverse easily.
- If you are an expert VIX trader, this is a good time to make some hay.
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I proved in my detailed analysis (the second link mentioned above) that the top 1% of biggest intra-day swings in the Markets have occurred during a Mercury Retrograde period 55 % of times. I consider that statistically significant.
My strategy hadn’t changed much so far. But now I shall get more agile with my open positions and revisit my current bullish intent for the intermediate term. I expect wild choppiness to commence from tomorrow onwards as I mentioned about in a prior post probably helped in part by Mercury Rx. I will be using any wild upswings to start scaling out of some of my bigger long positions. Of course there are fundamental macro reasons too behind this possible choppiness, which I shall hopefully cover in my next post.
I come from a school of thought that gives credence to relevant and ever-changing set of indicators no matter how silly they may sound. At the end of the day, making a profitable trade is about getting an edge, besides risk management of course.
As always, I shall post my trades in Twitter close to real time.
Good luck
StocksRider
Fuck Mercury Retrograde, “We go higher”.
Hey douche bag…
How is that NFLX trade working out?
Hey ADD-riddled fuckface, my positions are doing just fine and my call options are still over 100%. Unlike you, I am not married to any point of view including mine. You can find out what I am going to do next by reading my posts in entirety or twitter updates. But then, I know you can’t and you won’t.
but I thought you nailed it?
Twitter is now a portfolio tracker… Makes sense.
So why is NFLX tanking? Do you have any doji hammers in your bag of tricks?
“Gofuckyourself”, I lost a bit from where I was two days ago on NFLX. But I am mega up (117% to be precise)
As long as I am able to make at least a 80% return on my current investment in NFLX, which I will be due to my stop limits, my overall portfolio will remain green and it will so by spades!
So yes much to your chagrin, I nailed it fucker.
Twitter is not a portfolio tracker, you single-digit-IQed idiot. How would haters like you know whether I am making the right claims? Or far more importantly, how would genuine followers be able to make money through what I share? Through twitter, dip shit.
Love your posts SR.
Keep up the good fight.
Thanks RC. The feeling is mutual. Sometimes you need a boatload of haters to know that you must be doing something right.
Hey guy, why no word about the NFLX CFO departure?
you got your panties all wet and excited playing little Miss Detective only to be wrong
I thought the facts were public. You don’t seem to read too much either, do you?
CFO departed because he has been planning for years. Granted, it is warranted to raise eyebrows as to why now.
If you would actually go back and read the transcripts of the conference calls, which are available on various websites but maybe beyond your grasp of intelligence, you will find that the CFO first declared his intention to leave in 2004. Although the netflix spokesperson reminded us about this intent recently, the conference calls from back then actually contain information that can corroborate to his intent.
In fact at one point in time, he alluded to in a conference call back then that he may not be around after couple of quarters or so. It is common knowledge that Reed Hastings apparently pressed him to stay due to the competition with Blockbuster. And here is another missing piece of zigsaw puzzle. David Wells the succeeeding CFO, joined Netflix in 2004. If you put things together, then it is not too outlandish to guess that David was being groomed to take over Barry since 2004.
So the entire departure of CFO was not only a non-shocker in hindsight, but hardly indicative of a loss of confidence.
My main problem with the ZeroHedge article that I exposed of spinning is not that he questioned the inside sale. Neither did I make a statement about whether stock prices should decisively rise in that particular post. I got bothered that inspite of clearly documented as a pre-programmed sale, he malevolently interpreted the CFO’s trades as a deliberate sale reflective of possession of some kind of material information or a sudden lack of confidence. A dignified journalist would simply never do such a horrible job of mis reading facts and an equally dishonest job of putting a doomsday spin on the sale.
Now let us come back to your original conjecture about the CFO’s departure. By your logic, you should have been short since 2004. And if so, you should be the one peeing in your ass-broke panties. Instead you are looking into “wet panties” of a certain “little miss detective”, you perverse mother fucker.
P.S. to all readers – As I have been mentioning in my prior posts that over short term, NFLX’s historical uptrend is not necessary immune although there is a great deal of support at almost every round number level. I had also mentioned that I will be selling some at the opportune time in recent days. Given the recent price action, although I have not pressed the sell button, I now have a stop limit on my orders in an effort to preserve my substantial gains on the stock. In an upcoming post, I shall update my strategy on NFLX and disseminate non-trivial hypothesis on the company’s directions in the future. Developing….
Nice job.
Thanks Bubbles.
” I consider that statistically significant.”
why not just test for actual statistical significance instead of “considering it?” To be tongue in cheek, if something is definable, it doesn’t matter what one “thinks,” it matters what the measurable result is.
So post the actual significance, or not. Making assertions on considerations weakens you argument. If it is sig, post it, if it isn’t, change your understanding of the data to reflect a tendency you’ve noticed, but that isnt s.s.
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I Enjoyed this write up. Not because I believe in it per se but because of the method presented. Having a method is second behind only risk mgt in succeeding. Nice work SR, def don’t let haters bring you down.
Spyder thank you for the vote of confidence. Much appreciated. I see your point about using the phrase “statistical significance”. I agree with you. Perhaps I should have said “meaningful”. That being said, I did do the quantitative analysis that suggested the correlation wasn’t random. I posted my findings in a past post linked above. But here are the details for convenience. Would love to hear your feedback:
My focus was on the delta between the respective high and low of the day, meaning “High minus Low” values and then see if there was a correlation between big delta days and them belonging to Mercury Retrograde period.
I looked at top 5%, 4%, 3%, 2% and finally top 1% of the (High-Low) value days since 2006. I used the S&P 500 price data since 2006 for mining for the days in question. Then I went through all the days in the above mentioned brackets and flagged those that belonged to a mercury retrograde period. Data on mercury retrograde is available with actual times and dates on several websites.
This is what I found
Top (High-Low) days////Percentage of Days belonging to Mercury Retrograde Period
Top 5% //// 29%
Top 4% //// 31%
Top 3% //// 38%
Top 2% //// 43%
Top 1% //// 55%
The sample size is small since I took the data from 2006 onwards only. That being said, you can see the correlation between an unusually high swing in the market for a given day and the probability of that day belonging to a Mercury Retrograde period. This probability keeps increasing as the difference between the high and low keeps increasing as depicted by increasing percentage of Mercury Retrograde days in the above table. As you can see, if the intra-day delta belongs to the top 1 percentile of the population of the deltas, it has belonged to a Mercury Retrograde period 55% of the times.
Pls post something else be deemed a lousy king