Sunday, May 13, 2007

To trade or not to trade a bull

I'd like to show an example of why I don't try to trade in and out of a bull rally. What we're looking at here is the intial upleg out of the Mar. 03 bottom. The start of this bull market. Now if I was just using technical analysis I would have gotten knocked out of this bull run prematurely. Notice there were many divergences during this rise and one time when the market appeared to be ready to roll over and start making lower lows. If an investor only used TA he would have missed a good part of the nearly 30% run. Sure some can day trade in and out and lock in some profits. However I'm after bigger fish than that. As I've mentioned before the average upleg for final legs up in bull markets is 34%. So until the COT tells me to get out or the Point and Figure price targets are hit then I won't be doing something dumb like loosing my position. In strong bull moves the market can quickly get away from you if you're not in. I've mentioned this about PM before also. The PM are a lot more volatile than the S&P so it's even more important to establish a position in the metals and then just hold on.