TSP http://tspcenter.com/index.php

Wall Street itself is nothing but a grand Ponzi scam. Wall Street is institutionalized fraud sanctioned by government and blindly accepted by society, the market is highly manipulated, opaque, inherently corrupt, and rigged against individuals. Wall Street is the product of a long trail of greed, crime and corruption. Why didn't Wall Street warn anyone that the market was going down? It still amazes me to this very day that major Wall Street firms upgrade and downgrade stocks and sectors, but they could not save themselves. Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, and countless other financial institutions have failed in this debacle. Why didn't they downgrade themselves to an under perform or sell rating? The reason is simple and it's Wall Streets dirty little secret. They simply have no clue about the markets and really don't know anything but selling their services. They only have one bias and that is the greed bias. Even Wall Street mutual funds will still generate their fees regardless of what the market does, invest for the long term?

Maybe he uses a 5 day ma?

http://www.sentimentrader.com/subscriber/price_oscillator_sp_description.htm

Short Term Timer

Try to program this, best with 5 day ma

This indicator is an offshoot from a part of the 3-day cycle trading method outlined by George Angell in Winning in the Futures Markets. While the formula given in the book was part of a larger system and used on daily bars, I have found better use for it using 30-minute bars, and with a moving average to smooth out the fluctuations.



The formula is somewhat convoluted, but it does a good job at giving a "score" to individual price bars. Here is the formula itself:



((High - Open) + (Close - Low)) / (2 * (High - Low))



Let's look at an example. Say we have the following information for a particular price bar:





Then, that bar would get the following score:



((852 - 848) + (851 - 847)) / (2 * (852 - 847))

= (4 + 4) / (2 * 5)

= 8 / 10

= 80%



Since the bar opened near its low and closed near its high, it received a high score. While this is bullish for a time, when it becomes "stretched", that's when we need to worry. By following this information on a 30-minute time frame and using a 13-period moving average (one full trading day), the data can be responsive to intraday movements without giving us too many whipsaws.



GUIDELINES:

When the Price Oscillator reaches an extreme, it often marks short-term exhaustion in buying or selling pressure. We generally use readings over 59% to indicate an excessive amount of buying pressure (particularly when in a longer-term downtrend), and readings below 41% to indicate that the selling may be overdone (especially when in a longer-term uptrend). This indicator works especially well within defined trading ranges, and will give a false signal (likely becoming very extreme) when a trading range is broken and a new trend begins.



The chart below shows five distinct occurrences of the Price Oscillator reaching extremes. When can see that each time the market became overbought, indicated by a peak in the oscillator reading over 59%, the market had great difficulty sustaining any upward thrust. Conversely, each time we became severely oversold, indicated by a reading below 41%, the market rebounded or at least there was a letup in the selling pressure save for one instance. In the context of such a severe decline, oversold readings are less reliable, and it usually takes a more extreme reading to produce a change in trend (note the February 13th reading of 31% - more than two standard deviations from the average).







Although this is a real example and points out the value of following this information, we do not mean to intimate that the market ALWAYS peaks when the Price Oscillator reaches overbought, or troughs immediately after the indicator reaches 41%. It is a guideline and not a trading system unto itself.

STATS:

Since 2000
Mean 50%
St. Dev.* 9%
Maximum 79%
Minimum 23%



*Standard Deviation. See below...



68% of readings (1 standard deviation) should be between 41% and 59%

95% of readings (2 standard deviations) should be between 32% and 68%

99% of readings (3 standard deviations) should be between 23% and 77%



In other words, we should expect a reading under 32% or over 68% approximately 13 times per year. Since such a reading would be unusual, it suggests that we are seeing an unsustainable trend. These figures assume a normal distribution curve.

Water Fuel Car

Water Fuel Car

Traders Rule
From Ben Stein:(or why you need to buy when fundamentals are thrown out the window by the 'market')
Can Their Wish Be the Market’s Command?
LONG ago and far away, I was a student of law and of economics at Yale. The economics I found fairly easy...But the law was a total puzzle. Here would be one case that went for the appellant, but just a circuit away, or maybe even in the same circuit, there would be another case — with identical or almost identical facts — that went for the appellee.

I was puzzled. I sat in the Sterling library reading the cases over and over, but still could not get it. Then, one day, out of the blue, my learned brother-in-law Melvin, who had gone to Harvard Law School, asked me if I knew about “legal realism.” I didn’t, but I soon learned.

“Legal realism” said that the whole common-law system of abiding by past decisions was a fig leaf. What really happened, at the appellate level and probably at the trial level, too, was that judges made up their minds based on their predilections, their biases, which lawyer was their friend, what they had for breakfast that day. Then, because a case that reached appeal always had some legal merit on each side, the judges, or their very young clerks, picked whatever precedent they wished to support their bias and pretended that they were bound by that precedent and could not have decided any other way.

The scales fell from my eyes, and I went on to finish law school in fine fettle. It was just all show business and personal bias and what’s in it for the judge. That made law school easy.

Time has passed in a big way. But the lessons of legal realism have always been uppermost in my mind when I think about law or about anything else important: Stated reasons are often not the real reasons.

Because I usually write about finance, I have come to believe in the theory of what I would call “financial realism,” or what might more accurately be called “trader realism.” Under this theory, on which I have an imaginary patent, traders can see masses of data any minute of any day. They can find data to support hitting the “buy” button or the “sell” button. They don’t act on the basis of what seems to them the real economic situation, but on what’s in it for them.

Just as a tiny example, years ago a close friend, now deceased, was a trader in London for a big financial house. As he told it, one day I.B.M. came out with stellar numbers. The boss of the trading floor said, “O.K., the guy who’s getting the prize is the one who can make us money selling I.B.M. short.”

So the traders grabbed for their phones and started to put out any bad thoughts they could dream up about I.B.M. They called journalists, retailers, anyone. They sold huge amounts of I.B.M. short. Soon, they had I.B.M. on the run, made money on their shorts and went to Langan’s to drink champers.

As I see it, this is what traders do all day long — and especially what they’ve been doing since the subprime mess burst upon the scene. They have seized upon a fairly bad situation: a stunning number of defaults and foreclosures in the subprime arena, although just a small part of the total financial picture of the United States. They have then tried — with the collaboration of their advance guards in the press — to make it seem like a total catastrophe so they could make money on their short sales. They sense an opportunity to trick other traders and poor retail slobs like you and me, and they generate data and rumor to support their positions, and to make money.

MORE than that, they trade to support the way they want the market to go. If they are huge traders like some of the major hedge funds, they can sell massively and move the market downward, then suck in other traders who go short, and create a vacuum of fear that sucks down whatever they are selling.

Note what is happening here: They are not figuring out which way the market will go. They are making the market go the direction they want.

I know this because I know traders. They’ve told me that they love to sell into fear because fear is bottomless — you can make money selling all day, while buying eventually slows because enthusiasm has limits. The amount of money available to large professional traders is so large that they can overwhelm the market, at least for a while, anytime they want. And they like to do it when the market least expects it.

To my humble eyes, this is what we have seen recently on world markets. Note that the losses in United States markets alone are on the order of about $2.5 trillion in recent weeks. How can a loss of roughly $100 billion on subprime — with some recoveries sure to come as property is seized and sold — translate into a stock-market loss 25 times that size? The answer is trader realism.

The losses in the stock market since the highs of October 2007 are about 14 percent. This predicts — very roughly — a fall in corporate profits of roughly 14 percent. Yet there has never been a decline of quite that size for even one year in the postwar United States, and never more than two years of declining profits before they regained their previous peak.

In other words, traders are sending stocks down by a fantastically larger amount than is warranted by a recession or the losses in subprime. How and why does it happen? As someone said in the movie: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” It’s just Chinatown in trader-land, where money is made and there is no perspective.

So when you see the market gyrating wildly downward and hear some pundit saying it’s because of this or that data or this paradigm or that ratio, remember trader realism. The traders move the market any way they want, any way they think they can make money, and then they whisper a reason to journalists later in the day. Then the journalists print it or say it on television, and the amateurs believe it. And the traders snicker.

These traders, not economists or securities analysts, can turn the world upside down, make governments tremble, give central bankers colitis and ruin the lives of ordinary men and women saving for their children’s college education or their own retirement. In America today, it is the traders, not the politicians or the generals or the corporate bosses, who have the power.

This is what has become of the America of Thomas Jefferson. Lucky for the traders. Sad for the rest of us.

And one thing’s for sure: With the traders running things, it won’t be a good time for amateurs until the traders cry “Switch!” and the market starts to rise.

Comment: The 5% to 8% moves on markets around the world are commonplace today. 30% moves down are common in commodity stocks that are printing money. This is how the likes of Goldman et al. are allowed to make up their losses on SIV's folks. Buy the engineered dips on the good stuff, IMHO.

Just think of it as part to the new twist on bailing out the bankers. I admit I liked the old Greenspan way better, just throw money at failed banker investments, LOL. However, when the banks/brokers are 'restored', the run up will be humongous, so don't despair, hang in there

Was today an O'neil follow thru day?