Thursday, September 03, 2009

Morning Briefing for September 3rd: False Breakout


Note how we broke above the resistance mentioned in the recent post in the low 1000 area for the ES contract on overnight strength in China, only to now fall back into Wednesday's range. Such failed breakouts can be highly profitable trades if you identify them early. The high probability trade is back to the prior day's pivot level, which we typically hit over 70% of all trading days.

I notice that Henry Carstens' trend measure posted only 45% odds of a trend day earlier this morning. It will be interesting to see if that helps us identify false breakout days. Meanwhile, we look as though we'll be testing the Wednesday lows; I'll be looking for confirmations and divergences to handicap the odds of that leading to a downside trend vs. a false breakout to the opposite side.
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