Subj : Market Action To : All From : Paul Rogers Date : Thu Jan 08 2004 07:58 pm

"Cat on a hit tin roof."  That pretty much describes my view of the
market.  Except for an "oops" Friday afternoon, the NASDAQ has been on a
straight line up for the past 5 days.  This kind of movement scares me.
About the time when you suspend disbelief and believe what you see, then
the market corrects.  Maybe I'd better forget about trying to predict
the market direction, and just report the market action, as I always
say.

Report.  Yeah.  Report.  Once again the story was heavy volume and
relatively flat prices.  Volume was 47% above average.  Higher than any
day last year.  OK, as I said a few days ago, this will be misleading
for most of January because of the holidays.  OK, let's take just the
average volume for the 5 trading days so far this year. Today's volume
was 19.4% above that!  Today's price change was 0.4 of the Standard
Deviation for the past 20 sessions, nice but not particularly
remarkable.  The Advances/Declines ratio was about 3:2, that's nice.  Up
Volume to Down Volume was about 2:1, that's also nice.  It WAS a nice
positive day.  But that volume sticks out like a sore thumb.

Would there be a clue if we knew where the money was coming from?  I
expect it is inflows from various retirement accounts.  Some companies
keep employee contributions for a while and they are probably flushing
those slush-funds.  There was certainly some trading put on hold by the
big money managers during the holidays.  There just wasn't enough volume
for them to hide their tracks.  Some individuals are making IRA
contributions.  I would expect volume to be somewhat higher.  Last year
most of Jaunary's volume was above most of February's, then in March the
Bear fell asleep.

I don't know what's going on, something's wrong with my picture.  But
I'm here to report I don't particularly like what I see.  Why didn't all
this enthusiasm for buying stocks drive prices higher still?!  For every
willing buyer, there was a willing seller ready to trade at little more
than current prices.  Why aren't those sellers willing to hold?

 Price     Vola-     Momen-    Volume    Oscil-    Summ.
 Change    tility    tum                 lator     Index
 -__+      -__+      -__+      -__+      -__+      -__+

 _|__      _>__      __>_      _<__      __|_      ___>     01/02
 __|_      __>_      __>_      ___<      __|_      ___>     01/05
 __>_      __>_      __>_      ___|      __|_      ___>     01/06
 __>_      __>_      __>_      ___>      __|_      ___>     01/07
 __>_      __>_      __>_      ___>      __|_      ___>     01/08

Timing Signals:  I don't use or recommend timing signals, but they're
fun to watch.  If I did though, well, I might use something like this.
(Be warned!!  It tends to whipsaw around signal points!)

Last Signal: BUY        Date:  11/24/03 S&P:    1052
Winner or Loser:  tbd                   By:     tbd

See my market tracking charts for '01-'02 and my investment strategy
study at my website(s):
http://www.xprt.net/~pgrogers/Pers.html
http://www.angelfire.com/or/paulrogers/Pers.html
http://www.geocities.com/paulgrogers/Pers.html
.... A waist is a terrible thing to mind. ___ MultiMail/MS-DOS v0.35 --- * Origin: The Bare Bones BBS (1:105/360) .