Quote from kashirin:
there is no possibility now to make more than just to buy and hold
everybody who trades - underperform
so the only thing left for those who trade just to be ready when sell off starts
this is the most important moment
this must be a center point of any discussion on this forum, this forum can survive only if we have sell off
I remember 2007 slow grinding up, day after day after day
vix below 10. it was even worse than now but we got our sell off and 2 super profitable years
2007 was quite different. The market wasn't trading 10% above its 200 DMA and it wasn't a straight, unholy grind with zero volatility. There were still real dips, instead of just an intraday 3-point fall that is immediately bought. I don't understand why the VIX isn't at 0. It could go up once stocks move out of the ridiculously narrow trending range they have been in but until then I don't see why being long volatility has any point. (talking about the S&P500 here, the other large cap indices are not as straight but they usually aren't as consistent as the S&P500 since there are fewer stocks and sector variety in them thus less stable)
Bullish sentiment is not only apparant in sentiment polls and the price action but it also shows in ETFs and particularly mutual funds that there are virtually no bears left in the market, short bets just being hedges for those who are net long otherwise. There are still a lot of bears in the general population, obviously, which appears to be an argument among the bulls that the market will grind higher (something about last bear out of the door...before the collapse) but if they are bearish now, they certainly will not have been bullish in 2009 and either they lost a lot of their net worth in 2008 or they don't have any to begin with. These bears on boards like ET, MarketWatch (this one's extreme by the way) and others are not the players who move the market in the slightest. The people who make bets are in record long territory.
The only way for this market to grind higher is new participants entering (unlikely) and continuous buying on margin without any selling pressure (which is why I think is happening) or a real boost in economy to drive company performance up (thus keeping valuations equally high and price higher) and increased 401k investment. Edit: free money from the FED also qualifies to move the market higher but not as much in Europe. Further I don't believe QE3 will happen from a fundamental understanding.
Looking at the market from the institutional's perspective, I can imagine these guys, as a group, are in a bit of a pickle right now because if I read the flow correctly, there is no way in hell they can get out with the paper profits without the market tanking. I've seen two straight legs down now on the European markets (which I trade) which looked a lot like institutional activity (very steady and controlled decline). Of course they both bounced back up, but the ride down was a lot more smooth and met with much less support than resistance on the way up (could be my permabear bias though) so most likely the traders taking over the longs there. Incidentally both recoveries (this and last week) did not start until the US exchanges opened up which adds to my view these were probably frenzied trader's rallies.
Bear in mind there are fewer bearish bets left in this market than at any point since 2000 and this has been this way for over a month (according to my mutual fund data anyway) and the the retail customer has been coming back to the market in March 2010 after being out of the game for all of 2009 (then quickly fled again in May) and came back again around December last year and is now as long as he was in 2007 (arguably they are having a better run now than last year). However, as the market starts to tank there will be no bears who are taking profits, if there is no QE3 then the market will tank right back to the September bottom and perhaps grind down further if there are other negative news flow or god forbid the FED actually shrinking its balance sheet (like it did in May 2010). I'm not picking a top right now personally, however as the market starts to tank you can be sure it will be a quick and messy ride, perhaps a bit like Feb 27 2007.
This is the part about reading the tape. Don't get me started on the fundamentals of it.