Staying in and we a Flag developing.

Kind of an interesting thing we have developing with the S&P500. Today it was going to be the day that I either pulled out or stayed in if the Special Charting tool that I use either continued the red bars or if she printed a green bar. We printed a green from the opening and stayed green all day but what a roller coaster we had. We zipped up from the open 0f 1269 to 1277 and then crashed back down to 1269 and closed at 1274, almost in the middle. What is causing this? What is the news? Really do not care, what I have to do is try to examine what I see and play off of it. No matter what you think, we ended up with 4.77 point gain and that is always a good thing. But I decided to look a little closer at the S&P, so I scaled down from a daily chart and jumped into the 1 hour chart and lo and behold we have a little flag or consolidation happening. The last seven days trading we have stayed in a range of 1277 – 1262. Here is a zoomed in picture.

ZOOMED and Un-zoomed

This is not a bad thing and it is something that you need to allow fast moving prices or a long trend to slow a bit. What we want to happen is for price to not break down below this channel and then eventually bust out the top. This would be a great sign of a new uptrend. The current uptrend has been running since September 3rd and has had one minor pullback and a few pauses, so one here is not totally unexpected. If we are trading stocks then we protect ourselves with stop loss orders to preserve our capitol and or profit. If we are watching our retirement accounts, then we sit idol and wait for a move in a direction. No one can call tops or bottoms in the market on a regular bases, but we can try our best to ride the trends to get the meat out of the middle.

We are just now entering earnings season and I really expect the majority of the companies reporting are going met or exceed their expected earnings. This is always a catalyst for the market and I want to ride it up if it’s good and I will bail if the charts tell me to bail. My stocks have risen in value 5 days in a row, so the market must not be to bad of shape.

$0.00 realized profit today. AVG = $20.45 a day. Personal goal = $50 a day.  7 of 20 trading days for January complete. 

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	YTD 2011
$143.16	-	-	-	-	-	$143.16

Stock	Entry	Price	Stop	Profit	% Gain
AGCO	$52.90	$53.70	$50.64	$38	1
ARMH	$22.54	$23.41	$20.77	$89	4
ATML	$12.90	$13.79	$12.54	$178	7
CTSH	$64.98	$75.51	$73.24	$503	7
CY	$18.14	$19.93	$18.36	$268	10
ENTR	$13.00	$13.21	$12.09	$40	2
FNSR	$32.10	$32.75	$29.27	$44	2
KEM	$15.23	$15.38	$14.59	$25	1
MIPS	$16.72	$17.32	$15.74	$90	4
TOTAL	------------	-----------	----------	$1275.00	----------