Only 37% of NYSE stocks are over their 200-day moving average.

Usually, that’s the kind of statistic you see in a bear market but, miraculously, our masterfully manipulated markets don’t need broad participation to make record highs because the Banksters have very good algorithms that tell them exactly which key stocks to buy to give them maximum leverage while putting as little money as possible into any given index.  

It’s very profitable, too.  Just yesterday, our long /NG (Natural Gas Futures) trade made over $1,100 per contract as we ran up from $2.26 in the morning to $2.37 in the afternoon.  

This morning, we made the call at $2.26 again and we just got a $300 run back to $2.29 and we can do this over and over and over again because the machines running the program never get tired or running the same pattern.  We can even flip around and short under $2.40 (until it finally breaks) and take those rides down back to $2.26 (until that breaks) and, when our range fails us – we simply wait for the next predictable pattern to form and do it again.  

That’s pretty much all there is to Futures trading these days.  While we do pay attention to the overriding Fundamentals that are driving the market (in the case of /NG, we lean bullish because it’s getting cold in the winter – duh!), mostly we look for good, predictable patterns in the algos that show up on the charts which we can then take advantage of.  Much as we complain about how the markets are blatantly manipulated – we don’t mind so much that we won’t make a few bucks playing along!  

Take the major indexes, for example.  Yesterday, the NYSE had almost 3 TIMES MORE SELLING than buying volume with 50% more individual stocks falling than advancing but the stocks that did advance carried more weight than the ones that declined and held the index relatively flat for the day – fooling traders into believing things were holding up well – even as 70% of the transactions were sales on the index.