How to Trade This Weakness

End of Day Update:

Thursday was a good day for the S&P500 as it recovered a big chunk of Wednesday’s bloodbath. While we are still struggling to make headway, this was the third up-day out of the last four. How you interpret this price-action largely depends on your biases, but it is a notable change from last week’s relentless selling. This also marks the seventh consecutive day of above average volume. Thursday’s trade reached the highest levels since December’s options expiration and September’s option expiration before that. Clearly a lot of people were paying attention and trading this volatile session.

The weekly AAII sentiment survey revealed optimism is at the lowest levels in over a decade while pessimism reached multi-year highs. In this historically bullish survey, bears outnumber bulls by whopping 250%. Anyone claiming the market is overly bullish is delusional with confirmation bias because they clearly don’t see everyone running around with their hair on fire. While we might not be at the bottom yet, this dramatic swing in sentiment and huge volume means we are getting close. The last time we saw this much volume was back when August’s selloff was bottoming.

The only thing moving this market is the price of oil. Does this make sense? No, but this is how the crowd is thinking and thus the only thing that matters. But with each passing day and tic lower, we are shedding owners who fear falling oil and replacing them with buyers who don’t mind cheap oil. Maybe these calm buyers realize oil production represents less than 1% of U.S. GDP. Maybe they are experienced investors who know these stories always come and go. Remember the Bird Flu pandemic? No? What about the Fiscal Cliff? Sequester? Taper? US debt downgrade? This tells you just how big of a deal most of these things turn out to be.

But oil isn’t the only thing scaring investors. We have a strong dollar and slowing global growth that will allegedly crush our exporters. But the thing is all our exports together only represent 13% of GDP and only 5% of that demand comes from Asia. While knocking off a few percentage points won’t help our sluggish recovery, it certainly won’t cripple our largely self-centered, service and consumption based economy either.

But the market never lets common sense get in the way of a good stampede for the exits. There are two ways to trade the stock market. Buy at a premium and sell at a discount. Or buy the discounts and sell them later at a premium. Just like any successful business, buy at wholesale and sell at retail. Just think about that when you are tempted to join the emotional sellers. There has never been a dip in the history of the stock market that wasn’t buyable and this one is no different.

Jani

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