Short selling is a strategy used by traders to profit from a stock dropping in price.  A short seller borrows shares of a stock today, immediately sells them, and then hopes to buy them back at a future date, hopefully at a lower price, in order to return them to the entity that lent them [...]

Investors love a breakout.  There’s a feel of confidence that comes with buying a stock or Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that is making a new 3-, 6- or 12-month high.  For this reason, we love to track various measures of new highs to indicate the strength of a trend. As with many market-based situations , there [...]

The market’s rally back to the top of its range has everyone wondering if this will just amount to another dead-cat bounce rally that fizzles out again.  So far, the technical rally has played out exactly as it should with a nearly-perfect test of the S&P 500 Index’s (SPX) 1,100 level a little more than [...]

After another round of selling, the market is spending the day trying to dig itself back above the critical level of 1,100 on the S&P 500.  We point to this level as critical for a few reasons, most notably, the round-numbered aspect. History and technical studies show that investors tend to make buy/sell decisions when [...]

Today’s market action was highlighted by a third straight day of gains spurred by hopes that the European crisis was closer to resolution.  But stocks gave back much of their gains.  The Dow was up 325 points, or 2.9%, at one point before closing up 147 points. In looking through the charts of the major [...]