Volatility down on the week

With the main indexes closing higher on the week, volatility slipped lower by almost 9%, with the VIX closing in the low 14s.


VIX'60min

VIX'daily

VIX, weekly

Summary

So, yet another week where the bears had hopes...only to be dashed. Even the closing hour of today was another micro-failure for the bears.

The underlying, and hugely important weekly VIX cycle remains essentially floored. The only issue is when it will explode higher, not 'if'. Of course, the leveraged VIX instruments like TVIX/UVXY suffer from terrible decay, and do the standard VIX calls.

For the moment, I hold to a simple red flag warning outlook, where we should look for a weekly VIX closing >20. Until we see that level of weekly close, the more conservative bear traders should arguably just wait.

A little more later.

Closing Brief

A pretty weak 2-3pm hour, but the closing  hour was yet another bear fail. We did see a clear breakout this morning, the Dow broke above the QE spike high, and the SP' broke above what remained of the bear flag.

With today's price action, I am now a little more curious about how we'll open Monday.

The closing hourly charts...


IWM

Dow

SP

Transports

Summary

We are still in near term up trends, and the closing hour action was again supportive of underlying strength. The bears just can't get a decent sustained down cycle.

Until we see the recent key low of sp'1397 taken out, its just a case of higher highs..and higher lows.

Have a good weekend!

More later, and across the weekend.

3pm update - slipping back

A bit of a messy Friday. We're seeing weak commodities, especially Oil and the Metals.


sp'60min

sp'daily5

Summary

I'm certainly not going to get excited if we close red, but it would take the edge off what has been another deeply frustrating week.

If Oil can close <90, that would meet my second red flag requirements.
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*AAPL is weak, a close under the 50day would be a little bearish warning for next week, but really, its arguably the last stock in the world to short.
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back after the close