Sept 28

No good. The volatility has been more than my 15-min system can handle, but for the last few days it is swamping even my 60-minute system. The last 3 60-minute signals have been losers (starting with the gap up yesterday). Like I said Monday: If this thing breaks 118 on this wave, likely a new buy will get triggered (that is a very ugly set up).. Ugly indeed. I am sitting out until I get a compelling setup, and frankly nothing looks good in the no-mans land between 114-119.

Sept 27

What a mess

Sept 26

Just continuing to watch this this bounce. It's still in no-man's land with regard to the counts, and has not triggered anything on my trend system (no divergence signal at the bottom after this down cycle. And 92% of cycle bottoms have divergence. So the odds say sit tight and wait for a lower low). However the strength of this rally at the end of the day seems very out of place. This could be a rare instance where we get a bottom on no divergence. If this thing breaks 118 on this wave, likely a new buy will get triggered (that is a very ugly set up).

So the bottom line is the tape looks ugly, the indicator setups look ugly, the count looks ugly, my 15-minute system is getting faked out like crazy the last 2 days, so I am just sitting tight and waiting for a 60-minute setup to emerge.

Yet another reason why I don't think we saw 'the' top

I was going through my chart list and found a chart I put together in February and that I featured in this post: The VIX and Market Tops and Bottoms. The conclusion from that post was:

But based on the last two major tops (2000 and 2007), the VIX had very obvious divergence with the SPX. That isn't exactly what we are seeing now. The VIX is making essentially a double bottom (or as shown below, the inverse VIX is making a double top) when measured on the timeframe of a year. I would be very hard pressed to call this divergence 'obvious', especially compared to the last two major tops. This is another market measure that leads to the conclusion that I reached a few months ago: Whatever top we find here will not be a 'major' top. For more discussion on my long term thoughts, see here: Macro Thoughts and Observations. Is the Bear Market Dead? Is this the Start of a new Secular Bull Market?

Since that post in February, the peak in May also saw a lower low in the VIX, which means that there was no VIX divergence at the May peak. By itself, that is not conclusive to say a major top won't form, but when taken with other evidence, I think there is still a compelling case to be made that the May highs will be revisited (and likely broken to the upside) before this cyclical bull market is done.

So yes, that means that I think this current down wave is likely to be a correction in the cyclical bull. I have been maintaining for awhile that this will be a complicated 3-phase cyclical bull market (upleg, consolidation/sideways, upleg). Much like the 1970-1973 cyclical bull (Primary Wave). But since this wave is one degree higher (Cycle Wave), it will take longer and have a bigger sideways section in the middle. And after things are said and done I think this zone between a 1350 and 1050(ish) will end up being a relatively sideways wave in the big picture sense.

Sept 23

Nothing striking to comment on. Just waiting for this bounce to play out.