Limping back

I have been missing writing my daily note. It had been getting difficult to keep up with writing something about the markets on a daily basis. Once I took a small break it became even more difficult to start writing. The flow was just not there.

Yesterday, I spent much of the evening reading some of the notes I wrote in the past. (I have archived it in a blog-marketmusingsetc.blogspot.com) Without any false modesty permit me to say that some of the notes were actually quite good!

Anyway, after reading them yesterday and the encouragement I received from a few of you, I decided to start the notes once again.

A confession first. I wrote a note in the night yesterday which I had to erase today in the morning. The note was written at 11:30 in the night, India time when the S&P was up 13 points. Naturally, the note had a bullish tenor to it!

However, I was in for a surprise in the morning! The S&P ended down 6 points! A loss of 21 points in under 2 hours of trading. This has been the situation now for some time. Most of the activity in the S&P happens in the last couple of hours. Day before yesterday, the S&P was flat to negative for most of the day- only to end up more than a percent in the last couple of hours.

So the market now has become an animal that can either be traded on a very short term basis (almost intraday) or on a very passive long term basis. Anything in between is getting killed. Any active management of a position is only leading to disaster.

After writing all this let me say that the trend is down for all equity indices that we track. Dollar Index is trended up and is showing little signs of a let up. Commodities clearly are showing divergent trends with metals and crude on a downtrend and Gold in a uptrend.

Trading this market has been a pain in this financial year and there has been nothing else in the last couple of months to mitigate the pain. Indian cricket has reached the pits. Nothing to look forward to there. But why worry when we have one month of football extravaganza starting tomorrow? The only thing that I would have changed is the match timings! It would have been far better if the matches were held during market hours!