Originally posted by lescor
I lost some money on Monday too, and it's clear to me that the reason why was because of the number of large imbalances at the close on Friday, which was the end of the quarter.
For example, I was long NKE but couldn't figure out why because on the chart, it looked like the thing had gapped up. When I looked at things more closely later, I saw that NKE's final print on friday was a full dollar higher than where it had been trading minutes before the bell. I had two other stocks there were in the same boat.
When there is an order imbalance to close the stock, the specialist can gap it anywhere he wants, which is going to give you an out of whack closing price when calculating your fair value. I had been going through intra-day charts of all my stocks to try to catch these, but stopped because it was time consuming. But not doing it cost my $250 on Monday, so now my daily routine is 20-30 minutes longer.
Nobody said it was easy.
ahhhh....that's a great heads up lescor. i was well aware of the MOC imbalances related to window dressing and the rebalancing of the russell indices going into the close. however, i didn't look for the closes to be so skewed for the large caps, because on a normal day, imbalances are normal for the large caps. they usually have little effect on the closing price. i'll pay more attention to this in the future.