With just 14 days until the US presidential election, I’ve got this feeling like the 2-minute warning in American football – we’re at the home stretch, and better keep our eyes peeled.
There are so many directions to look when it comes to the financial markets.
- First, there’s the short-term volatility that’s ever present across the indexes from the S&P 500 down to small caps.
- Then there’s earnings reports which are coming in and especially expected to be market moving when it comes to the big tech stocks like Tesla reporting on Wednesday, October 23rd.
- Of course, there’s the ongoing economic data, especially on inflation and the job market for us to analyze to see how it might feed into the Fed’s view as they make decisions on policy. In fact, the next FOMC meeting is two days after the election…
So we are in for a couple of exciting weeks here.
Now, I’ve never been one for “doom and gloom”, and I’m still not. I will however, say that based on everything I’m seeing about how markets are behaving and especially the underlying forces behind the price action, I think we’re in for another once-in-a-lifetime set of opportunities over the next several weeks.
I continue to have my go-to approach for making short-term intraday trades on the ES futures, and I’ve been expanding my horizons and peering out. To see what I can add to compliment my trifecta approach and have it work even better in what I expect to be further choppy environments with potential sharp drops and strong surges.
I’ve come upon some resources (let’s call it that for now) that look like they could just be the thing to help in this environment. So much so that today something I had long delayed, setting up a TradingView account. Because while I’ve been trading and analyzing with TradeStation for over 20 years, the resources I want to dig into are only available to deploy on TradingView for now.
What those resources are, what part of trading to look at and more I’ll be sharing later. In fact, I’ve set a time and date: Tuesday, October 29th at 1:00 PM Eastern, so mark that on your calendar and save it to join me live in a Zoom webinar. That also happens to be my wedding anniversary! Lucky year 13 🙂
For now, here’s a couple pointers to navigate the very short term.
First, solidify the basics. In my case, that’s a trifecta of price, time, and momentum, and I advise you to pick at least one of those areas when it comes to your market analysis and ask yourself, “am I really as solid in the basics here”?
–> It could be for momentum, that would be everything I cover in my Four Zones RSI Coverage System.
–> Or market timing, taught in my Lost Forecasting Trading System (special going on for that one right now).
–> As for price action, that spans all of my education, but is most concentrated in the S&P Edge Pro where I put out research and do live trading. It’s where you see my various price action analysis techniques come to life. So if you have one or any or all three of those products, I definitely recommend checking in on your tutorials and exercises and making sure you have your basics down.
Second, expand your horizons strategically. If you are trading a particular stock or asset class or security, start looking at the other markets that are related to it.
–> For example, I trade the E-mini S&P 500 futures, but I’ve witnessed that they are tied to the E-mini Nasdaq 100 futures, in that those tech futures often lead the S&P action. So while it’s not part of my everyday analysis, I’m going to start checking in on what’s going on in the NQ futures for myself a bit more often.
–> If you trade gold, then you could conversely look at bonds as they are both flight-to-safety type investments.
–> If you trade individual tech stocks, then I would make sure that you’re looking at related industries, for example the whole microprocessor complex vs just NVDA.
Again, be strategic. Don’t add a million things to your plate just yet, but pick something to analyze along the way. The reason being that it will force you to get a little bit more objective by looking at that additional market and just kind of having it on the side next to your main one.
Third – super important – pay the closest attention of your life to your specific market you trade and see how it is moving compared to how it usually does. As an example, I trade the E-mini S&P 500 futures, and I have been noticing over the past few weeks that the first 15 to 20 minutes after the 9:30 AM New York market open aren’t presenting my setups as much as they generally did before this pre-election period. That may persist, so I’m tracking this.
I’m paying attention to what seems to be different now, because paying attention is the first step to being able to strategically maneuver what you’re doing, and again, I have come into some resources that may really help no matter what you trade. It addresses all major asset classes that I’ll be sharing more information on October 29th at 1:00 PM Eastern. It’s really exciting stuff, and that’s what I’ve got for you for now.
We’ll see what unfolds as we move past this 2-week “warning” into the election and FOMC week. Hopefully some of my husband’s Green Bay Packers and my Indiana Hoosiers football luck will rub off onto these markets!
~Hima
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