marginnayan.....
I guess I am a little old fashioned - in my early years at this I was what was called a tape trader and old habits die hard. No tape as such any more but my primary market minder screen has all the stocks that I would watch if there was one. Watching the "tape" this morning we had some agressive block selling into the market, especially in the DJ types, but agressive is all I could say for it - all the blocks were handled easily and in an orderly manner. It never reached the point that I would call "get me out NOW", which was what I was hoping to see. In the NAZ, there were a few stocks that were being hit with agressive selling, but most were holding up well with good block buys coming in also - INTC and many of Zeev's "Q" being good examples.
We keep getting close to doing what it takes to make a bottom, but I have yet to smell real FEAR in the air - far too many folks are petrified that they will miss the bottom and the big rally, and not enough are afraid of losing what is left of their money. Admittedly the DJ and NAZ are both oversold and sentiment measures (VIX, VIN, P/C ratio, and BP for NAZ and DJ) are headed in the right direction, but I think they all need to get more extreme readings before a bottom of any significance is put in - and of course for me, the "tape" just does not look right. I did cover my shorts this morning, but did not go long - at the time being either long or short seemed more of a crapshoot than anything else.
Longer term, I look for this to last a long time, and am inclined to think the final bottom will be more like the '73-74 bear, ending more with a whimper than a final crash. It is far too early to make that type of prediction now, though.
Hope that helped, but I understand that the "tape reading" part is very subjective and not much to work with. When I first started doing this (early 70's), you could literally "hear" a rally or selloff starting up by the sound of the tapes running across the wall.
Good luck to you.
mlsoft
AI
