Day Trade Emini S&P 500 NASDAQ 100

5 min Emini Nasdaq 100

If you believe in the long term uptrend, today should be a good opportunity for long term investors to buy in. While day traders like us don't really have such long term views, it's useful to know the big picture.

Ok, enough said... so how did I fare for the day?
From 10:00 am till 11:00 am there was a surge in price, but I missed it... there weren't any signals for me to enter apart from the fact that yesterday was a downday and long term investors would treat today as a good chance to enter again.. If you have been reading my blog, you probably know that I trade solely on my indicators and adhere to a strict discipline.

After that, from 12:00 till 14:00, the market was basically ranging and we can tell that by the hovering movements of Short-term MACD around the zero line.. This is a killer market, I avoided it like plague.

From 14:40, however, the stochastics turned sharply upwards and price seemed to rebound from the moving averages... I entered 1 contract at 1900.5. The entry appealed to me as my stop loss was tight at 1898. I entered another 2 contracts at 1902... after that, it was just waiting for the trade to work out... Short-term MACD crossed its signal line as a confirmation.... At 1907 however, price action started to weaken and I exited at 1906 with profits of $270.

Notice that after my exit, price went up even further, stochastics instead of cutting down, went up again.. well, I did not managed to capture this... but that's fine... I play by my own rules...

From Briefing.com::
April core PPI was unchanged. This is good news and follows a similar unchanged reading in March. February was +0.4% and January +0.3%. The year-over-year increase dipped to just 1.5%. Total PPI was up a bit more than expected at +0.7%. Energy prices were up 3.4% and are up 10% over the past three months. Whether these pressures flow through to the core rate in the months ahead is a critical inflation issue.

April retail sales fell 0.2%. This is disappointing but not terribly surprising after the very poor same store sales numbers posted yesterday. Excluding autos, sales were flat. The consumer spending outlook is much in question now, particularly with rising gasoline prices and slowing employment and wage gains.

Finally, in what is continuing to be one of the most under-reported stories of the year, the US federal deficit continues to drop sharply. Yesterday afternoon, it was reported that the surplus for April was $177.1 billion. That was $58.3 billion above the April 2006 surplus and lowered the deficit for the past twelve months to just $145 billion. That is down from about $435 billion three years ago.

The deficit has now dropped to just 1.1% of GDP. That is well below the 3% or so level that most industrialized countries such as France, Germany, Italy, and Japan are running. It is down from the near 4% level of 2004. The decline in the budget deficit the past three years has been nothing short of extraordinary and has caught everyone (including ourselves) by surprise. It received almost no press mention yesterday.

This mix of economic news won't have much impact on the open. A bounce after yesterday's sharp sell-off is likely. Whether there is followthrough support today and early next week will tell much about whether underlying sentiment has become more cautious.