Not Another Elvis Bearing Ricin

If you're looking to make sense of the past week, you won't find the answer here.

In just the past seven days, we've had a marathon bombing, a world-wide manhunt, the marathon bombers in a police chase, spewing explosives along the way, the leveling of a Texas town, Ricin being sent to the president, an earthquake that killed 186 and injured 11,000,  and ghastly details coming out in a trial in Philadelphia. Any one of these stories would normally make a full week.

It bordered on the unbelievable at various times. Mark Steyn wrote in the Nation Review, “…the Ricin guy, a man who (in further echoes of those first days after 9/11) mailed poison-laced letters to a Republican senator and the Democrat president. The would-be Ricin terrorist turned out to be not a jihadist from Yemen or Waziristan but an Elvis impersonator from Mississippi whom Senator Wicker had once booked as entertainment for a friend’s party. Kevin Curtis is not just your run-of-the-mill Elvis impersonator, but a seven-time finalist in the prestigious “Images of the King” competition. Yet he is, in fact, the second Elvis impersonator to be mixed up with Ricin, following the arrest last year of Michael Conley in a Florida motel room after a showdown with cops in which he brandished a vial of white powder at them.”

When Elvises bearing Ricin barely gets mentioned in the evening news, you know you've had a busy week.

The Dow dropped 421 points, or 2.8%, in five days. And you know what? Hardly anyone cared. So little sympathy was shown that the market turned around Friday afternoon, April option expiration day, leaving a reversal pattern just above the 50-day moving average. It appears at this point that last week's market action was nothing more than just a short term cycle low. The Dow has been setting short-term lows at 2- month intervals. This one, if it stays that way, will have occurred right on schedule:

Is there any history of action in the market over the next few weeks? No. In fact, over the last 31 years, if you take out 1997 and 2010, you would have had more excitement painting your house and watching it dry.

Of course, you should be more of a spectator than a trader as the market opens this morning to start the week. Once the coast seems clear, you should consider selling May calls against the stocks you own. Keep an eye out for earnings announcements on your stocks, and consider the possible effects of unexpected results. Finally, look at stocks you've traded in the past six months but don't currently have positions in. If they have been cycling within trading ranges, this may be a good time to trade the cycles. That may work better than trend trading this market. I've got a good example in today's newsletter.

Of course, there's much more you need to know and many more stocks you can capitalize upon each and every day.  To find out more, type in www.markettamer.com/seasonal-forecaster

By Gregg Harris, MarketTamer Chief Technical Strategist

Copyright (C) 2013 Stock & Options Training LLC

Unless indicated otherwise, at the time of this writing, the author has no positions in any of the above-mentioned securities.

Gregg Harris is the Chief Technical Strategist at MarketTamer.com with extensive experience in the financial sector.

Gregg started out as an Engineer and brings a rigorous thinking to his financial research.  Gregg's passion for finance resulted in the creation of a real-time quote system and his work has been featured nationally in publications, such as the Investment Guide magazine.

As an avid researcher, Gregg concentrates on leveraging what institutional and big money players are doing to move the market and create seasonal trend patterns.  Using custom research tools, Gregg identifies stocks that are optimal for stock and options traders to exploit these trends and find the tailwinds that can propel stocks to levels that are hidden to the average trader.

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