Negative Divergences in Gold

Here ya go, Cuadra G. They're slight, but they're valid, I'm pretty sure. Gold has been charging ahead. With the latest breakout $1000 is in reach by the measured move. Being a pretty large psychological barrier, I wouldn't be one bit surprised if it hits $1000 and then has a $50-100 correction. You can see how in the Weekly RSI it barely dipped back into the regular range before the next breakout sending it back into overbought. I expect it's not done yet, but it's good to be aware of at the same time.

I took some time to look for an article Chris wrote once. I thought it was in the Start Here section of CRISS, but I didn't find it. In it, he was commenting on how a recently run through correction had brought the indicators close to oversold which was good, but the Weekly RSI only got to the 50-line and I forget what the MACD was doing. Anyways, the dailies looked good, but the weeklies were cause for concern, that's why I found the weekly gold so interesting.

Hold, Close, or Buy?

Hi ccrane, I don't mind putting the name out there of the TTR trade since the sell to close order has already come out and no one is going to make money off of Chris's recommendation now. It's difficult to comment on your idea to hold because I don't know what prices or when you got into the COG calls or turned it into a spread. I sounds like you did it all just yesterday which is a little scary. If you did, I'm sorry. The RSI was already in overbought territory and it would have been better to wait for the next opportunity. If I'm understanding you right, you want to hold onto both the long and the short call hoping that the call will become worthless (or just less) so you can buy it to close for a profit and then sell to close your long call. All I can say to it really is Chris gave the sell and you should follow it. Anything beyond that is your own speculation and risk. You're capped on your gains anyways because the short call will eat up any profits (or at least some) from its strike price upward that your long call would gain. If you wait for it to drop, your long call is losing, too, so you might as well close your positions. That's my advice.

I'm going to throw a little sidenote in here though just for "huh, look at that" value. In looking at the 3 year chart I noticed that every single time the RSI moved into OB territory and back out while the price was making a NEW HIGH, the stock price retraced to previous resistance, but when it only got close to OB but not through, it had an increased tendency to break back below previous resistance and return to previous support or near to it. SO, what I'm calling (depending on the next day or two's price movement relative to its new high) is a return to the $42 to $43 price level after which we'll see what it does. To be honest, I'm tempted if the price holds to a new resistance that it would be neat-o to buy a put and make money on the way down, but I'm just going to watch it. Reason being is, buying a put on a stock in one of the strongest sectors with strong relative strength is completely against the CRISS method. So I'll watch it and be amused if it does what I think or it'll do the opposite and I'll be glad I didn't act on it. The odds are against me in this one, or at least not stacked enough. I'll wait for the next opportunity...

Point & Figure Pointers

By no means am I an expert on P&F, but what I understand I will share. The main point of P&F charts is to take the "noise" (less significant regular fluctuations in a stock's movement) out of the way so you can get a clearer picture of the current condition of the stock. When you're looking for buy or sell signals, you don't want your settings to be too sensitive or the P&F chart won't filter out the noise and you'll get a lot of buy and sell signals. On the other hand, you don't want it to be too INsensitive or you could miss significant moves to which you should be paying attention. You can do this in two ways, either by adjusting the amount of boxes needed for a reversal or by adjusting the value of each box. Sometimes a mixture of both might be better. Below I'm going to compare two different line charts of Goldcorp Inc displaying the buy and sell signals given by a P&F chart with box values of .5 with a 3 box reversal, then of .7 with a 3 box reversal.

You can see obviously how a .5 box value generated many B&S signals and would have had you buying high and selling low if you went solely on P&F while the .7 box value identified the significant resistance break and trend reversal. The same thing can be done with adjusting the # of boxes needed for a reversal signal. First a .5 with a 4 box reversal and below that a .5 with a 6 box reversal.
You can see how adjusting the reversal achieved the same result. The downtrend was identified in June of 06 and the buy signal was in the same place as for the .7 with the 3 box reversal. I would always recommend looking at the line chart also to see the daily activity along with the various indicators that we've been taught, but this at least is one way to use P&F charts.

I'm using them in a sort of a broad way. I'm looking to identify LT trends so that when I see a signal, it's more significant to me and I can reasonably rely on it for possibly months on end. With the buy signals here, I could watch for "touchdowns" to trendlines as entry points, but I could do that just by looking at the line charts. I haven't really used these a lot and haven't found a lot of use for them yet. If anyone else relies on them heavily or has insights that I've missed, please help me (and mario) learn by sharing them with us...