FuturesTechs Blog

Here at FuturesTechs we are constantly evolving our product, and in recent years we have added a merry band of private customers and ‘at home’ traders to our following via our website members area.

One request from a good few of our less experienced members is for a bit more clarity as to our current thinking about short term trend, and preferably something visual. So we have devised the coloured bar that you can see next to our levels on the left. We will release this new innovation on Monday 16th November.

You can see there are three colours on display: Green, Grey and Red.

If we are in the green zone the market is bullish technically. In the grey zone the technical outlook for the markets is neutral or uncertain. In the red zone the technicals are bearish.

These “skews” are short term outlooks. The medium and long term pictures may differ. We have decided that the profile of our average customer is short term, so this is the most useful timeframe for a tool of this type.

So let’s think about how different looking SkewBars should be treated.

To the left is an example of a SkewBar that’s more or less all green, with only a dash of red at the bottom. This means that the market is very bullish, and that you probably want to be buying it! We suggest that you trade “to the long side”, looking to try and buy dips to support levels, or buy breakouts through resistance levels. If you were scanning through each of our reports looking for something that might be worth a buy this is the sort of SkewBar you’d be looking for.

Stops can be placed below any support level, of course, but it’s only when we move out of the Green area that the short term skew changes from bullish.

In this case there is no Neutral Zone, the market flips straight to bearish below 120.98.

In this SkewBar the market is pretty neutral, only turning bearish if we break below bold support at 121.63. The neutral skew stays in place until we get all the way up to 123.04. It is only above here that the bulls regain control of things.

In Neutral markets you should can trade in either direction but don’t hold too much conviction. Many traders like neutral conditions as they can do plenty of lower risk “range” trades, trying to do more trades but take smaller amounts of money each time.

You may want to try and “play the range” by buying at the bottom end of the grey band, selling if and when the market gets near the top.

If we then break out of the range by moving into the red or green zones then things have changed and playing the range is no longer the game in town.

Our last example SkewBar is a bear market, and this doesn’t change unless we get above 123.04. Even above here the market only turns neutral. There is no green portion on our SkewBar at all, which means the bulls don’t even get as look in!

We hope this new innovation is a helpful visual addition to our reports. It has been suggested to us that sometimes the reports can be a little ambiguous, and while we try not to send mixed messages sometimes that’s just what the market conditions are. Hopefully the SkewBars will give a little more clarity.

To all our long term readers we’d like to point out that nothing’s changed with this innovation with respect to how we analyse the markets, we’ve just added a bit of colour, if you like!

As always your feedback would be most welcome. info@futurestechs.co.uk

Last week’s big highlight was meant to be the US Employment Report. As it turned out all the action was before this, and the numbers were a bit of a damp squib (like the topical analogy there?).

Equity markets have caught a fresh bid, and we were early to catch this as there were several reversal patterns on major indices at the start of last week. We were bullish from Wednesday onwards, so have reaped some firm rewards on the back of that timely change of sides.

Most of our readers are short term traders so they benefit from these timely “calls”. Longer term traders and Investors may be on the sidelines waiting for an opportunity to get in, and coming out of a dip or retracement is an ideal opportunity. Often, as was the case last week, our charts can tell us nice and early if it’s likely that a pullback has come to an end.

We are now looking to see if resistance at 5300 in the FTSE Index will be seen off. If this  happens the next upside target is 5650, a failure high from last August.

Gold is on another big run at the moment and has traded up to a high of $1111 as of yesterday morning. Yesterday’s candlestick (A “Shooting Star”) gave a warning that things may be getting toppy at these levels but so far we haven’t seen any downside moves to confirm this, so we’re sticking to the idea of higher prices going forward, targeting $1192 next, then $1250.

Oil is stuck in a range for now. Brent Crude has traded between $75 and $80 for weeks now. We expect this range to get broken with a move higher, and we would then target $90 and beyond. We have been suggesting to our clients to buy the dips to $75, and whatever their timeframe this has worked out well. Longer term holders would never have been offside, whereas those who trade in and out should have been able to jump out at $78 to $80 on several occasions then buy again at £75 next time it comes off.

If you are uncertain of any of the terminology used or methodologies discussed in this report you could swot up on our website. Feel free to ask for a Free Trial by clicking here.

Yours,

The FuturesTechs Team

Have a look at this “mystery” chart and tell me what you think?

Does anyone think this (whatever it is) is going down any time soon?

Hopefully we’re all thinking the same thing: That it looks very much like something that’s got a bright future, something that’s going up in the world. There doesn’t seem to be too much evidence that it is topping out, would you agree? In fact if this was a stock and you owned it you’d probably be more than happy to hold onto it, yes? And if you felt the market was going to head lower and you wanted to find a short trade to put on you probably wouldn’t chose something as strong as this, agreed?

It was Charles Dow almost 100 years ago who suggested we can define an uptrend as a series of higher highs and higher lows. In contrast a downtrend is defined as lower highs and lower lows, which brings me on to the next chart.

As you can see this is a chart for Royal Bank of Scotland between October 2006 and the present (August 2008 in case you’re reading this in retrospect). Now I’d like to point out straight away that I could have chosen any number of bank stocks from any number of countries for the purpose of posting this blog. I used RBOS because I’ve got a couple of mates who work there and I’ve got a sadistic streak. Sorry fellas.

Because I think it’s fair to say this chart is quite a bit different to our first chart, wouldn’t you say?

Well the eagle eyed amongst you may actually have noticed that it is actually THE SAME CHART, but “flipped”. We have effectively put a mirror below the real chart to create our “mystery chart”. So the mystery chart is RBOS with 7 quid at the bottom and £1.50 at the top.

Now think about the paragraph above, and think about your reactions when you read it. I would imagine it was something like this:

“… it looks very much like something that’s got a bright future (I agree!), something that’s going up in the world (yes indeed). There doesn’t seem to be too much evidence that it is topping out (too right, it’s a stonker!) , would you agree? (yes) In fact if this was a stock and you owned it you’d probably be more than happy to hold onto it, yes? (yes please, love it!!). And if you felt the market was going to head lower and you wanted to find a short trade to put on you probably wouldn’t chose something as strong as this, agreed? (agreed, let’s short something else, surely).

Which brings us to the title of this Blog: “The most common question of 2008″. Which is, of course “Should I buy Bank Stocks?”. I reckon you just answered your own question!!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

If you want to gamble go to a casino. If you want to play the stock market or make money spread betting follow some simple rules and don’t just put on stupid high risk trades. I’m sick of being asked this question. It’s a joke. It’s simple: Don’t buy things that are still going down.

Let the pros tell you when to buy, ie let the market tell you when enough professional buying has happened in a Stock that it is now in an uptrend.

If you “flip” the chart and there’s no way in the world you would SELL our mystery chart, then what the heck are you doing even thinking about BUYING it when we put it the right way round?

The point I’m making isn’t that Bank stocks haven’t bottomed out. They might have done, but there isn’t enough weight of evidence yet. It’s a dangerous trade, and there’s no need to rush in. These stocks could go sideways for years now, or even keep heading lower, after all we haven’t broken our series of lower highs and lower lows yet, have we?!

Can I finish by saying that we have the chappies at Updata to thank for making “flip” a standard part of many charting systems these days. I’m pretty certain it wasn’t until they started to expound exactly what I’ve done above.

Cheers,

Clive.

PS. August is turning out to be a bit of a damp squib in Equity markets so far, and the best advice I can give is to suggest you don’t get too carried away if you’re trading Equity Indices like the Dow and the FTSE. The market has a habit of taking money off of you in quiet periods. There could be some really solid trends to trade between now and the end of the year. Don’t take yourself out of the game trading during low volume quiet periods like now.