Selling the S&P 500

Well, that sure was interesting. I mean updating my newly revised trading setups just now with this afternoon's data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Oh, yeah, the markets were interesting, too!

As you'll see from my Latest Signals page (see link on the right), my setup for the S&P 500 has now gone to bearish. The setup had already been in bearish mode since the Dec. 24 Commitments of Traders report based on the excessive bullishness of the "dumb money" small trader crowd . But I was waiting for confirmation from the 50-week moving average of the S&P 500 index before selling the index short. If the average is sloped upward, I go to cash during bearish signals, instead of going short. As of the open of this week's trading, however, the 50-week average is now sloping downward. This setup operates with no trade delay, meaning execution for the open of trading Monday. See the "How It Works" link for more on how my trading system based on the COTs data works.

I'll be back here early next week with more details from the latest data.

More blog updates: I've updated the Latest Signals page with newly revised, improved setups for the Nikkei, silver and XGD Canadian Gold iShares. These are in addition to the other new ones I've announced in the past few days for the S&P 500, NASDAQ 100, Dow Jones industrials, Russell 2000, gold and the HUI Gold Bugs Index. Thanks again to the ever-talented Dave for his insights and help with these setups!

Also: I've made some refinements to my risk-management rules for this trading system. Read about them in the notes on my Latest Signals page table (see notes 8 and 12). Also see the explanations on my Glossary page under "Portfolio Allocation." Have a good weekend and good luck next week!