Market On Open - Thursday 31 August

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One Kind Of Rug Pull Is, No Rug Pull

The most entertaining Big Money Rug Pull of 2020 wasn't the Q1 spike down and reversal.  You couldn't be surprised by that one.  Literally the whole of DC was on television telling you that the market was not going to breach SPY220 to the downside. Go back and check.  The then Speaker of the House appeared on CNN and said, "now we know that the market isn't going to down any further".  Not coincidentally, that same SPY220 was the level struck when the then President took office.  Then you had Q1 options expiry, which was as put-heavy as put-heavy can be, meaning dealer hedge unwinding cause a big short-covering catalyst for the stimulus fuel that the Fed tossed on the fire.  And then nitrous-injected the whole get-up.  Cue monster rally up and out of the lows.

No, the best Rug Pull that year was that it just kept moving up.  If you waited to buy the dip, well, there wasn't one.  A teensy-weensy pothole in Q3.  Other than that, it was a straight-up market all year and 2021 wasn't much different either.  If you shorted the rally?  Ya burnt.  Shorted the hole?  Burnt.  Did anything other than ride the wave?  Burnt.

We don't say that this is afoot at present.  The Nasdaq is hinting that something like this might happen but that could be just a headfake, and it doesn't matter until QQQ is in the mid-400s, so we don't need to worry about it right now.  But what we do say is that the thing about Rug Pulls is, if you are expecting it, it's not a Rug Pull.  So if you are expecting the rally of the last couple days to be retraced and sold, be ready for it to not be.  For that is just the kind of malarkey with which Big Money likes to subject the civilians.

The trick as always is to watch the market.  Watch the charts.  Look at the smaller timeframes even if you only invest or trade according to longer timeframes.  And if you trade every tick on the smaller timeframes, zoom out to see where you stand and what the dominant direction is in the larger degree.

Oh, or read this note daily where we help to do this for you.  Speaking of which, for our paying members, we now move on to walk you through our short- and long-term outlook for the Nasdaq, the S&P500, the Dow Jones and the Russell 2000, together with Bitcoin and Ether.  If you've yet to become a full member of the Inner Circle, you can sign up right here.