For the past two years or so, I've been pretty much obsessed with the equities market. Ever since it collapsed in late 2007, my 401K and IRA lost a portion of its value. I know I'm not alone, but I wanted to know the reasons behind it and how I can spot the signals before future market corrections.With that in mind, I started to educate myself about the world of equities trading. I took baby steps at first and started with fundamental analysis, but that proved to be useless in a bear market govern by fear. With fundamentals, I can go on and on about what I think a stock price should be because of XYZ reasons, so in essence it's all based on past history and potential future forecast that can of course be manipulated. What I really needed was something more technical and visual, being an artist and all. So my path took me towards technical analysis. It is a study of price action among many other things which I don't have time to get into. All in all, EVERYTHING appears in the charts first. Even before the news. Anyway, back to the point of where we are...
Here's an analysis I did of the weekly chart of the SPY (S&P 500 ETF). I wanted to see what I would've done differently knowing what I know now. As I was drawing on top of it, I notice a lot of signals that should've made me pull out of my IRA and 401K. Live and learn. For now, I'm mostly in a cash position and I trade whenever can or when I spot an opportunity (pre-breakout) I simply can't resist. As for longer term investments, I wouldn't add anything to my retirement stuff until price breaks/holds above a flattened 200 day moving average (Blue line). As you can see we have ways to go.
