Plenty of experts on Twitter were calling for a top in SPX today as it rallied up to the daily 200ma. On SPY there was a market dump that can be seen on the 5-min chart today (after 2pm). However there are two points of caution for immediately jumping into swing puts:
1 - price has yet to touch the light blue downtrend line, which would be around 4335-4340
2 - RSI is still elevated without divergence (green oval), which often occurs at major turning points
The yellow zigzag shows a possible pattern that would also create bearish divergence with RSI. Upon hitting the daily 200, first round of sellers come in and market pulls back to 10 or 20ma. Buyers return and move SPX up the blue line, and that's when the downturn really begins. Note that I am sharing the possibilities that I see, and I am not married to any one idea. This rally could even go higher than that blue line. Traders usually lose when they become too insistent and expectant on one idea.
We likely are at or near the end of this rally, yet you can see by all the rangebound chunks of days that you may not want to go all in puts/short. While those calling for a serious downturn may be correct, it does not have to happen tomorrow, or this week even, and holding time matters in option trades.
Repeat - TIME matters! Have you been correct on a directional trade but lost money or made little gain because your option expiry was not far enough away? Been there done that. Now when I execute a trade I think about how long it may take for the price move to happen and then choose an appropriate expiry.
Please please please do not predict or expect price action to follow any pattern because others are showing a historic similarity! There is way too much of this "history repeating" commentary on Twitter.
1 - price has yet to touch the light blue downtrend line, which would be around 4335-4340
2 - RSI is still elevated without divergence (green oval), which often occurs at major turning points
The yellow zigzag shows a possible pattern that would also create bearish divergence with RSI. Upon hitting the daily 200, first round of sellers come in and market pulls back to 10 or 20ma. Buyers return and move SPX up the blue line, and that's when the downturn really begins. Note that I am sharing the possibilities that I see, and I am not married to any one idea. This rally could even go higher than that blue line. Traders usually lose when they become too insistent and expectant on one idea.
We likely are at or near the end of this rally, yet you can see by all the rangebound chunks of days that you may not want to go all in puts/short. While those calling for a serious downturn may be correct, it does not have to happen tomorrow, or this week even, and holding time matters in option trades.
Repeat - TIME matters! Have you been correct on a directional trade but lost money or made little gain because your option expiry was not far enough away? Been there done that. Now when I execute a trade I think about how long it may take for the price move to happen and then choose an appropriate expiry.
Please please please do not predict or expect price action to follow any pattern because others are showing a historic similarity! There is way too much of this "history repeating" commentary on Twitter.