What a crummy day for your beleaguered host!
The core problem, of course, was my idiotic refusal to accept the reality that if Gartman had turned bearish on crude oil, then the downturn was completely through. My portfolio is fairly heavily influenced by crude oil (in spite of me having no position in it directly), so the benefit that crude’s weakness had been giving me in recent days was totally ruined today. It was ugly.
Even worse, though, was what happened with small caps (to which likewise my portfolio is inversely correlated). Let’s take a glance at today’s action:
The green tinted area represents the ramp-up to the FOMC announcement. Everyone pretty much expected that there would be no news (and they were right), but for whatever goofy reason, things drifted higher right up to the very moment of the announcement. Shortly before it came out, I augmented by existing shorts with three decently-sized positions in Materials Select Sector SPDR (N:XLB), Industrial Select Sector SPDR (N:XLI), and Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR (N:XLP).
The magenta area shows that, once the announcement came out, the floor fell out from beneath the market. You can imagine how elated I felt. I am well aware that there are plenty of head-fakes on Fed days, but this move looked legit.
Of course, it wasn’t, as plainly shown in yellow. I managed to get out of XLB at a profit before the turnaround, and take small losses on the other two ETFs, but by and large, the explosive move higher made me feel like the U.S.S. Portfolio was capsizing.
With just a couple of days left this month, October will, mercifully, soon be at a close. This has been a rotten month for me overall. And, just to add potentially more salt to the wound, Kuroda (Japan’s equivalent of Yellen) is doing his announcement and press conference late night Thursday (my time), so that’s another potential train wreck happening.
There ARE good bullish charts out there, but frankly, they are along the lines of Facebook (O:FB) and Microsoft (O:MSFT), and I just don’t want bring myself to hope the Greater Fool Theory keeps playing out with issues like that.
I’m probably going to hang up my charting hat for the day. If I get my wind back, I’ll do another post, but otherwise, I’ll see you good people in the morning.