3/22 Morningline

For blue chip stocks, it was a trampoline morning. SPY was trading at around Friday's close after opening lower and then bouncing back up, with the psar in bear mode and a flickering pps bear signal that, like the Cheshire cat in Alice, couldn't make up it's mind whether it wanted to be visible or not.

Treasury long-term bonds (TLT) opened above Friday's range and was trading near the high attained on Wednesday.

	trend	adx	psar	pps	macd	macd trend	sto	sto trend
SPY $115.91
TLT $91.42

High-yield corporate bonds (JNK) and emerging markets (EEM) also opened lower and then bounced back into range.

Gold (GLD), oil (USO) and the EUR/USD currency pair opened below Friday's range and stayed in the cellar. The USD/JPY stayed within the nine-trading-day range.

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Abbreviations: psar - Parabolic Stop and Reverse, adx - Average Directional Index, pps - Person's Proprietary Signal, ma20 - 20-day moving average, macd - Moving Average Convergence-Divergence, mfi - Money Flow Index, sto - Fast Stochastic   

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GLD was showing a psar bear signal, after a two-day whipsaw into bullishness, as was USO, after a three-day whipsaw.

	trend	adx	psar	pps	macd	macd trend	sto	sto trend
JNK $39.37
GLD $107.08
USO $38.41
EEM $41.51
EUR/USD $1.3486
USD/JPY ¥90.05

My holdings . . .

Well, things are fairly meager now. I've not found much to commend itself for  April trades.

MCO is trading at $29.71 within a three-day range. The macd has declined slightly from Friday and the sto has moved from overbought into the neutral zone. My covered call on this symbol has a strike of $29 (-c29). PALM, a zombie position left over from a covered call, is trading at $3.97. Up 0.3% from Friday's close. This would be impressive, except that the price difference is only a penny. A note on the paucity of positions . . . As a trader I always have this intense desire to have a full inventory of positions, to the limits of my rules on maximum risk of funds. I mean, if you don't play, you can't win. And two positions -- one of them a zombie dropping body parts left and right as it staggers through the bleak fields of the Nasdaq -- aren't really playing in a serious way. On the other hand, I don't want to enter positions that I distrust. I'm not obsessive about my rules -- I have broken them on occasion -- but I do take them serously and only break them if I have a good reason for doing so.

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Unless I find some positions that meet those rules and in addition "feel right" to me, I won't play and shan't sweat the missed opportunities. After all, there is another month after April, and an endless string of months stretching far into the future. No problem.

About the indicators: SPY tracks the S&P 500, TLT: 20- and 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds, JNK: High-yield corporate debt, GLD: gold, USO, oil, EEM: emerging markets, EUR/USD: how many dollars to buy a euro, USD/JPY: how many yen to buy a dollar.


About the glance:  The colors indicate the state of each signal.

• trend: green for up, red for down, yellow for sideways
• adx: green for above 30-up, red for 20-down, yellow for in the middle. Red is most prone to whipsaws
• psar, pps, macd: green for bull mode, red for bear
• sto: green for overbought, red for oversold, yellow for the neutral zone.

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