calm waters

market vibes

October 3…) 

“It’s all right now. I’ve learned my lesson well. You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.” Ricky Nelson 1972 

If you’re trading S&Ps, you’ll know there has been dominant selling in the 1st balance of every session 5 days in a row, even quarter end but the buyers were determined to have a strong close on Sept 30.  

The same sample in hourly data (chart below).

Yesterday sellers dominated the 1st balance again despite some bad news thinning out the bids. At the lows a powerful twap swept the market higher. Since there are no humans trading equities in 2024, I look for robotic behavior moving through the liquidity pool like ships in a crowded harbor and what I see is a long-time frame program selling into the highest tick volume of the session every day as you can clearly see.  

I used to see buyers doing this often in 2021 and I keyed on it to trade the latter part of the session when twaping buyers benched their new AUM to the close. I do see occasional close banging but not the heavy pulse of money flows we saw in August.  

If I had a gun to my head and I had to buy oil, I’d buy 2-oil for the heat season and hope for a cold November. The port strike might be a problem for PAAD 1 deliveries, and an early winter would squeeze out some embedded short OI.  

But the spot heat cracks are still weak, and the crude charts still look iffy. Front spreads are still weak. Dec Red Dec is up a little but terrible location to buy it if Israel goes for a slap on the wrist. The best gamble (good word) for a new long in crude is a seasonal bump in heat cracks. So far distillates don’t care much about the Iron Dome.  

In gold and other markets