Week of 2012 AU 31

SPY fell by 0.3% this week, while my account rose 0.3%.  The loss-floor is now -10.4%.  Basically, my account is unchanged over the last three months, while the broad market is up significantly.

US market news: Dr. Ben Bernanke gave a speech at Jackson Hole WY.  My expectation was that there would be a microburst of inflation just after his speech, to act as an APPLAUSE! sign for the markets.  I think the microburst did happen, and previous metals went up a lot, but equities were weak so I didn’t make as much overall as hoped.  Still, a positive week!

Friday’s allocations:

Daily % gain size │ Max loss Sym  Buy │ Fri Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri │ Beg   End   IAU  AU14 │ +0.5  14  +0.5  14  +0.5  14  +0.4  14  +0.4  14  +0.7  14  │ -0.4 -0.4 TZA  AU23 │ -0.2  15  -0.3  15  -0.3  15  -0.3  15  -0.3  0  │ -1.2 -0.6 URTY  AU23 │ +0.1  15  +0.2  16  +0.4  16  +0.6  16  +0.2  16  +0.4  16  │ -0.8 -0.3 PPLT  AU29 │ -0.1  7  +0.1  7  │ -0.4 -0.3 SPY │ +12.8     +12.8     +12.7     +12.8     +11.9     +12.5 │ me │ -8.6 -8.7 -8.5 -8.4 -8.9 -8.3 │ floor │ -11.5 -10.6 -10.6 -10.4 -10.8 -10.4 │

PPLT: Bought this platinum ETF on a whim, to bulk up my “precious metals” allocation to 20%.  Bought at 11:25am, which was about two hours too early.  So far, so good!  Am using a 5½% trailing stop.

Stock-trading robot

InteractiveBrokers: They don’t offer registered accounts, just margins.  Obviously they are making their profit on rehypothetication of customer deposits, not on transaction fees.  Now that US courts have ruled repeatedly that margin accounts have no consumer protections at all (your deposit is a loan to the broker; any loans from TBTF banks are senior to yours), it seems too dangerous to trade with anything other than a retirement account.  So I’ve given up on IB.

Disnat.com: An online broker associated with Desjardins Bank in Québec.  No API, but seems scriptable like Schwab.com.  They say that Canadian retirement accounts may not trade options at all.  They claim this is a government regulation, although OptionsXpress seems to disagree.

HostMDS.com: Quote-fetch timeouts at 2pm on Thursday and 1pm on Friday.  This is ridiculous.  HostMDS delenda est!

VPSville.ca: I am thinking of selecting these guys as my new ISP.  Online reviews are quite mixed; it seems they expect their customers to know what they’re doing, so less-knowledgable customers are unhappy with them.  Prices for a virtual private server (which is all VPSville offers) are double or triple what I am paying to HostMDS — but a VPS should allow me to leave Opera running all the time, which should cut way back on timeouts.

Ticker Symbol		Buy date			Buy price			Sell date			Sell price			Acct Profit
		Model	Actual		M	A		Model	Actual		M	A		M	A
TZA		AU 23 13:00			$17.02			AU 28 11:00	AU 27 14:54		$16.45	$16.68		-0.5%	-0.3%
URTY		AU 23 13:00	AU 23 13:01		$61.13	$61.07		(Not yet)

TZA: This trade had a “near-death experience” Monday morning, so I invoked the “experimental new rule” from last week and sold it at the top of the rebound.  The experimental new rule suggested selling “after the first hour where price moves against me”, but instead I watched the market all day and picked the sell-time manually.  My result (2:54pm) is very close to what the new-rule suggestion would have chosen (3:00pm).  Had I not intervened, this trade would have stopped out with a bigger loss the following morning, so it’s a WIN for the experimental new rule!

URTY: Normal trend trade in progress.

Week of 2012 AU 24

SPY fell by 0.5% this week, while my account rose 0.5%.  The loss-floor is now -11.5%, the same as its value on June 22nd.

Friday’s allocations:

Daily % gain size │ Max loss Sym  Buy │ Fri Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri │ Beg   End   IAU  AU14 │ +0.1  14  +0.1  14  +0.3  14  +0.4  14  +0.5  14  +0.5  14  │ -0.4 -0.4 SRTY  AU22 │ -0.1  15  +0.2  16  +0.1  16  │ -0.9 -0.3 TZA  AU23 │ -0.1  15  -0.2  15  │ -1.2 -1.2 URTY  AU23 │ +0.1  15  +0.1  15  │ -0.8 -0.8 SPY │ +13.3     +13.3     +13.0     +13.0     +12.1     +12.8 │ me │ -9.1 -9.1 -9.0 -8.9 -8.5 -8.6 │ floor │ -9.6 -9.6 -9.6 -10.5 -12.5 -11.5 │

IAU: Doing great!  Already over halfway to the +0.8% gain level, when the trailing stop will take over and start raising the max-loss floor.

floor: Once again, the loss floor went briefly below -12% during the week, then popped back up by the weekend so I didn’t have to lower the bottom of the chart above.

Stock-trading robot

OptionsXpress: Asked them how to apply for API access.  Reply: “At this time we are no longer providing access to our API.  The information regarding our API that is displayed on our website is currently in the process of being removed.”  I have cancelled my application to open an account with them.

InteractiveBrokers: These guys seem to be the only ones left still offering an API to retail customers in Canada.  Their gateway wants to run as a daemon and have the access password re-entered manually each time it starts, so not suitable for my current hosting service (I would need a virtual private server).  Haven’t called them yet.

Ticker Symbol		Buy date			Buy price			Sell date			Sell price			Acct Profit
		Model	Actual		M	A		Model	Actual		M	A		M	A
SRTY		AU 22 11:00			$41.47	$41.64		AU 24 11:00	AU 24 11:02		$42.27	$42.11		+0.2%	+0.1%
TZA		AU 23 13:00			$17.02			(Not yet)
URTY		AU 23 13:00	AU 23 13:01		$61.13	$61.07		(Not yet)

SRTY: Another winner!  But it could have been better: on Wednesday, the robot did not get its “buy” order entered until 11:00:43am, by which time the market had moved significantly from the top of the hour.  On Friday, the 11am quote-fetch timed out, so the “sell” order was not entered.  I put in a market order two minutes later, but (as usual) a limit-order would have been successful — and it would have salvaged the +0.2% expected gain for this trade.

TZA: Normal swing trade in progress.

URTY: The “buy” order was entered late because the robot took so long entering the TZA order just before it.  I really need to investigate whether I can switch to InteractiveBrokers for faster quote-fetching.  As usual, it looks like the URTY model bought too soon.  I might have to sit on these shares for a week before the price starts moving upward.

Surfing the oscillations

Here is a chart of the last 20 years, showing what happens if you buy gold and sell the Russell 2000.  The charts for S&P500 and Dow Jones Industrials look about the same.  The blue line shows a parabolic curve.  I expect that this trend will continue until the year 2015 or so, when “Kondratiev winter” ends.

As of today, this is the only long-term investment idea I have.  Buy gold, sell equities, wait.  It’s so simple!

Week of 2012 AU 17

SPY rose by 1.1% this week, to its highest weekly close since May 2008!  I have raised the top of the chart to +14%.  My account fell 0.4% to just above its lowest value ever.  The loss-floor is now -9.6%.

Participant mood: The bears are howling in pain!  It looks like the markets will be rocketing to the moon from now until November.  This is the “capitulation”, which is followed by the “blow-off top” and then the “crash”.  But November is just a wild guess; David Banister predicts that it will end by early September at the latest.  Really, the markets will keep going up until some piece of news spooks the herd.  What will it be?
      Volume on the New York Stock Exchange is the lowest it’s been in ten years.  There was a large drop (around 20%) that occurred suddenly when Knight Capital went out of business, as if a whole bunch of HFT computers were snuffed out.  Falling volume with rising prices is usually a pre-crash sign, but there is no telling how long this uptrend might continue before it turns.

US news: The Obama Administration is considering a release of oil from their Strategic Reserve.  Last year, they announced a release on June 23.  The market jumped for two weeks, then wobbled for three weeks, then plummeted and did not return to its pre-announcement price for eight more weeks.  Of course, there was also a debt-ceiling debate at the time, and the official reason for the release was Arab Spring in Libya; neither of these seem to be happening this year.  Something awful will have to happen in the Middle East (presumably involving Iran) to justify a release from the reserves.  The stock market generally falls at the start of a war due to uncertainty.  I still think that Obama wants the market to crash before the election, because low stock prices hurt Republicans more than they hurt Democrats (and nothing else matters to those clowns).  But Obama is a weak president and his government often seems to disobey him, so who knows what may happen?

Euro news: Chancellor Merkel has returned from vacation and put her foot down regarding the illegal money-printing that was going on at the national banks.  The Euro has been falling, which usually causes US stocks to follow suit, but not this time.

Friday’s allocations:

Daily % gain size │ Max loss Sym  Buy │ Fri Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri │ Beg   End   SRTY  AU10 │ -0.1  15  +0.1  15  +0.1  15  +0.1  16  +0.1  0  │ -0.4 -0.3 TZA  AU13 │ -0.4  15  -0.3  15  -0.6  15  -0.7  15  -0.7  15  │ -0.7 -0.7 IAU  AU14 │ -0.0  13  +0.0  13  +0.1  14  +0.1  14  │ -0.4 -0.4 SPY │ +12.2     +12.3     +12.2     +12.3     +13.2     +13.3 │ me │ -8.7 -8.9 -8.8 -9.1 -9.1 -9.1 │ floor │ -9.0 -9.2 -9.6 -9.6 -9.6 -9.6 │

^size: On Wednesday, the size of my SRTY position increased from 15% to 16% of account, even though the position had already been sold by that point, because the denominator (total size of my account) dropped from 8.8% below-start-of-year to 9.1% below.
      On Thursday, the size of my IAU position increased from 13% of account to 14%, even though the total size of my account did not change significantly, because the price of gold went up a little and the position was already so close to 14% in size.

Stock-trading robot

HostMDS:  Timeout failures on quote-fetches continued until Thursday, when things returned to normal.  Presumably one of HostMDS’s other customers complained and got them to fix whatever it was.  I didn’t put in any effort this week towards finding a replacement ISP.

Schwab: Although Schwab and OptionsXpress are owned by the same holding company, I still can’t transfer my account from one to the other.  They say the legally-approved thing for me to do is open an RSP and then slowly transfer money from the IRA to the RSP, to minimize the tax bite.  I don’t want to do that.  I have begun the process of opening a TFSA account at OptionsXpress. The money will get taxed when it leaves the IRA but there is no tax credit for TFSA deposits.  Profits (if any) *should* be untaxed while they remain inside the TFSA, but the USA doesn’t recognize that kind of retirement account so the legalities are still unclear.  I have to open the account (which will take several weeks) before I can find out whether they will allow me to use their API, without which there will turn out to have been no reason to have opened the account.  Catch-22!

Ticker Symbol		Buy date			Buy price			Sell date			Sell price			Acct Profit
		Model	Actual		M	A		Model	Actual		M	A		M	A
SRTY		AU 10 11:00	AU 10 12:06		$43.75			AU 13 14:00			$44.10	$44.08		+0.1%
TZA		AU 13 11:00	AU 13 11:01		$17.99			AU 14 10:00	AU 16 11:19		$17.15	$17.09		-0.7%

SRTY: Another winning trade for the SRTY model!  The win:loss ratio is now 8:11, with a gain of +1.3% over four months.  Average return for this model is supposed to be 2.5% per quarter (but only 1.25% average for the second quarters), so even SRTY is doing poorly — still, it is eking out a profit even under these adverse market conditions.

TZA: Was bought one minute late because HostMDS was still running so slow; robot got the expected top-of-hour price anyway.  On Tuesday, the robot thought it had stopped out, but actually hadn't because the TZA stops are slightly looser than the IWM calculations due to leverage.  I added a fake high price to Monday's data archive so robot would know that I still owned this thing.  On Wednesday, price got down to $17.20, with my stop at $17.10.  Finally stopped out for real on Thursday.

Gold trading

Ticker Symbol		Buy date			Buy price			Sell date			Sell price			Acct Profit
		Model	Actual		M	A		Model	Actual		M	A		M	A
IAU		AU 03 16:00	AU 14 09:30		$15.61	$15.57		(Not yet)

Limit order finally filled on Tuesday, with a gap-down so I got price improvement.  By then the 50-day moving average had risen to my limit price, so gold bounced there and has been rising ever since.  But the price of gold usually moves very slowly, so my account has gained only 0.1% so far on this trade.

Surfing the oscillations

Last week I predicted that IWM's price would fall back to the red channel line, which it did on Monday.  Then I said it would either start heading down to the lower red channel line or it would bounce and “begin a period of serious uptrend”.  It seems the latter is what has happened.  This may be the “final blow-off top before the crash”.  It could go on for months, or it could end next week.

The market is nearing “overbought” levels, so I am expecting a downdraft for next week.  If it is sharp enough, my URTY model will trigger and I will “ride the bull” for awhile.

PPO-based swing trades

	Bull swing (TNA)			Bear swing (TZA)
Stop adjust	×1.000	×1.003		×1.000	×0.999
Win:loss	29:15	29:15		21:13	21:13
Profit	50.73%	52.13%		66.33%	66.37%
Avg.Risk	1.27%	1.13%		0.48%	0.46%

This week my TZA position had multiple near-death experiences before finally kicking the bucket, with a full loss of my initial maximum risk.  I thought that maybe my stops should be slightly looser, but new tests indicate that actually they should be tighter.  The table at right shows results for 2008..2011.  These results may be somewhat bogus.  Tightening my TNA stops by 0.3% seems to produce noticable improvements in profit and risk, with no effect on which trades are winners or loses.

The results for TZA are useless.  The profit and risk improvements are insignificant.  It is unrealistic for me to tighten stops by 0.1%, because other slop in the system often causes reality to differ from my model by more than that.  Maybe someday I can get proper quotes from OptionsXpress and set proper stops that don’t involve guesswork multiplication — but not today.

Next approach: when prices get *close* to my stop and then bounce, then sell on the next upswing because things will be going bad soon.  What counts as “close”?  For TZA I tried using ¼ of STDDEV(7) since I have that number lying around and it scales based on market volatility.  By this definition, TZA had three near-death experiences this year (late April, early May, and mid-August).  It looks like all three of them could have been helped, but there aren’t enough examples to be sure.  Oddly enough, backtesting shows no similar experiences in prior years, so clearly something has changed in this market.

Experimental rule: If prices get close to the stop and then bounce, then sell the shares manually when the retrace seems to be over (e.g., after the first hour when price moves against me by more than a trivial amount).

Week of 2012 AU 10

SPY rose by 1.2% this week, returning to its high of the year back on MR 30.  My account fell 0.4% to its third-lowest value of the year.  The loss-floor is now -9.0%.

Bankster activity: For the first time since 2008, the US Fed has started doing “repos” again.  This is where they print up some money and give it to crony banks in exchange for worthless IOU’s, because the alternative would be that “too big to fail” banks would fail.  At least $600 million has been printed during these small-scale tests over the last week or so.
      On Wednesday, it came out that the Bank of Greece printed €800 million (with tacit approval from the ECB, despite the blatant Maastricht treaty violation).  Presumably this was done because the alternative would have been a complete collapse of Greek government.  It seems that Greece will need to print €3.2 billion of the common currency over the next month, which means the wealth of all Europeans is being secretly diluted to support those banksters who loaned money years ago to other banksters, who had borrowed in the name of the people of Greece.
      On Thursday, it was reported that a US appeals court has affirmed a lower court’s ruling that when a futures brokerage pledges its customers’ money to a TBTF bank to cover the brokerage’s own debts, that is not “fraud” and the bank need not return the stolen money to the retail customers.  It seems the USA has only one law right now: the TBTF banks are always right — this law supercedes all others.  It is unclear whether this latest ruling applies only to futures accounts.  I have a retirement account.  There are many laws limiting what a brokerage can do with retirement money, but perhaps the “one law” supercedes all of those.
      Mark Carney, head of the Bank of Canada and also of the world Financial Stability Board, has now officially refused the offer to become head of the Bank of England as well.  He says he will “blow the whistle” on banks that fail to adhere to the new capital requirements and believes that Canadian banks will meet these requirements years before everyone else.  It sounds to me like he is threatening any world banksters who fail to join his team — will his next job be grand nagus?

The world of sports: This weekend, the Olympic Games will end.  Many stock traders have been enjoying them.  There will be a let-down next week because no more enjoyment of that type will be available for several years.  Historically, the stock market tends to fall during the week after the games.

Friday’s allocations:

Daily % gain size │ Max loss Sym  Buy │ Fri Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri │ Beg   End   TNA  AU06 │ -0.1  15  +0.2  31  -0.0  31  +0.4  31  -0.3  30  │ -1.7 -0.3 SRTY  AU10 │ -0.1  15  │ -0.4 -0.4 SPY │ +11.0     +11.3     +11.8     +11.9     +12.0     +12.2 │ me │ -8.3 -8.4 -8.1 -8.3 -7.9 -8.7 │ floor │ -8.3 -10.0 -12.1 -10.6 -9.6 -9.0 │

floor: The loss-floor briefly went below -12% on Tuesday, but picked up again by the end of the week so I didn’t have to lower the bottom on the weekly-progress chart above.

Stock-trading robot

Quote-fetch system:  Worked fine until Friday.  The 11am, 12pm, and 1pm fetches all timed out after 60 seconds, while the 2pm, 3pm, and 4pm fetches barely succeeded in slightly less than 60 seconds.  Problem doesn’t seem to be at Schwab’s end, while my ISP does not seem otherwise slow.  I had to go out on Friday, so it was a bad day for the robot not to be working.  On Saturday, test quote fetches continued to be problematic, until I ran Opera interactively on the server; after that things seemed to work again (but we’ll have to see next week).  My ISP now says that I am allowed 200 MB of RAM for my processes, but I don’t remember what the old number was (or if it was different).
      There seems little point in complaining to my ISP about this; they’ve already said they think I should upgrade to a virtual private server.  I think it is wrong of them to remove features (such as last year’s ability to recompile my own programs, and perhaps now the ability to run programs larger than 200 MB) from a service that I have already paid for in advance — they should refuse to renew if they don’t want to continue their business on current terms.  My lease with them expires next month; perhaps I should find a new home for my robot.
      Further research has suggested that it is illegal for me to move my account from Schwab to Interactive Brokers — or to anyone else.  Because I am not a US resident, no broker is permitted to open a new IRA account for me and so my money is stuck at Schwab forever.  However, last year Schwab bought OptionsXpress, which offers an API to their trading system.  I should call Schwab to find out whether moving from Schwab to OptionsXpress is permissible for non-resident IRA’s.

Ticker Symbol		Buy date			Buy price			Sell date			Sell price			Acct Profit
		Model	Actual		M	A		Model	Actual		M	A		M	A
TNA		AU 06 11:00			$52.96	$53.00		AU 10 12:00	AU 10 11:05		$53.16	$53.09		-0.3%
		AU 07 11:00			$54.27	$54.26
SRTY		AU 10 11:00	AU 10 12:06		$43.75			(Not yet)

TNA: Yet another loss.  There was a sudden downdraft on Friday just after 11am, causing a stop-out with slippage.  Without that event, the rest of the day would have been okay and I would still be holding TNA, which might very well go up early next week.  But it seems sudden downdrafts often presage more sustained downtrends, so it’s quite possible that the loss would have ended up being just as large but postponed into next week.

SRTY: The quote-failure at 11am prevented robot purchase, but I didn’t notice until noon.  I entered the order manually at “market price” and then left the house.  It just so happened that I got the exact price that the model had called for an hour earlier.

Surfing the oscillations

The market zoomed up to the channel line in the first half-hour of Monday, continued rising until 1pm, then fell back to the channel line for the close.  On Tuesday it gapped up and spent the rest of the week doing a “bull flag”.  I think it will drop back to the upper channel line next week — but after that it might fall back into the channel (and start heading towards the lower line) or perhaps it could bounce off the upper line and then begin a period of serious uptrend (presumably fuelled by bankster money-printing since the fundamentals are all very bad these days).  I’m leaning bearish, but there’s just no way to know.

The market remains stuck in the same ±3% range that it’s been in for two months now.  I haven't gained or lost any significant money during this time.  My understanding is that many traders more seasoned than I have had similar experiences.  This has not been a good year for trading!  Just my luck.

Gold trading

I put in a limit-order to try to get last Friday’s price, but gold never got that low this week.  Gold has closed higher for six days in a row.  The last time that happened was early June, after which gold spent the next three days going straight down and giving up all six days’ gains and more.  I will give my limit-order another week.

David Banister suggests that gold should be bought when it reaches $1630/oz, which happened for a moment Friday morning (followed by falling prices for the rest of the day).  Sy Harding says his indicators are hovering just below a “buy” signal for gold and he is waiting for $1645/oz (the 30-week moving average).  I think this means that neither of them has bought yet, and I haven’t either.

MACD-based news trades

SRTY has been my best-performing model this year, yielding 1.2% of profit over four months with a win:loss ratio of 7:11.  I could jack this up by e.g. buying two tranches instead of one, but that would tie up a lot of money and I don’t have much left.  Another approach would be to buy IWM puts instead of SRTY shares.  They require much less capital so I could buy more (potentially a lot more) of them.  However, this would require requesting “Options level 1” from Schwab, which I became eligible for as of Christmas 2011 (but I never sent in the request).

Week of 2012 AU 03

SPY rose by 0.5% this week, while my account fell 0.4%.  The loss-floor is now -8.3%.

Tuesday: At 3:59:57pm there was a single trade on /ES for 150,000 futures contracts (notional = $10 billion).  In June there had been a huge buy and then the market went up; this time apparently a huge sell, but the market just sagged a little without a major drop.

Wednesday: Ben Bernanke of the US Fed did not announce any quantitative easing.  The market fell.

Thursday: Mario Draghi of the ECB did not announce any quantitative easing.  Immediately afterward, at 7:30am EDT, another 65,000 futures contracts on got sold on /ES (= $4.4 billion notional).  The market fell.

Friday: Short squeeze!  Europe started rising, then the US govt announced the non-farm payroll: 165,000 new jobs (of which 429,000 were fake), then US markets opened and continued the rise.  In accordance with tradition, the NFP will be treated as the “cause” of a market action that began hours earlier.

Friday’s allocations:

Daily % gain size │ Max loss Sym  Buy │ Fri Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri │ Beg   End   SRTY  AU01 │ +0.4  15  +0.8  16  +0.8  16  │ -1.2 -1.0 TZA  AU02 │ +0.0  15  -1.1  14  │ -1.6 -1.4 SPY │ +10.5     +10.5     +9.7     +9.6     +8.9     +11.0 │ me │ -7.9 -7.9 -7.9 -7.5 -7.1 -8.3 │ floor │ -7.9 -7.9 -7.9 -9.1 -8.7 -8.3 │

Stock-trading robot

Ticker Symbol		Buy date			Buy price			Sell date			Sell price			Acct Profit
		Model	Actual		M	A		Model	Actual		M	A		M	A
SRTY		AU 01 14:00			$47.54			AU 02 14:00			$50.15	$50.16		+0.8%
TZA		AU 02 10:00			$19.71	$50.10		AU 03 12:00			$18.15	$18.12		-1.1%

SRTY: Yay!  Biggest win since June.

TZA: Rats!  Biggest loss since May.

Quote fetch&archive system:  The daily replacement of Schwab quotes with Barchart quotes worked correctly Monday through Thursday, but once again failed Friday because Barchart insisted on providing two days’ worth of data when I asked for one.  Maybe this is a general Friday problem?  Added code to the program to delete unrequested data from Barchart.
      On Tuesday, Barchart said that the 10am quote for IWM was $79.12, while Schwab had said $79.27 which is 0.16% higher, so my “allow 0.1% slop” rule wouldn't have been enough.  Schwab's quote was from 10:00:10am and the market moved a lot during those ten seconds.

Interactive Brokers:  I haven’t yet looked into how difficult it is to move an IRA account when you don’t live in the States anymore, but I did find out that InteractiveBrokers is indeed a “clearing broker” (meaning that they hold your positions in their own name, rather than using a 4th party).  Their API seems to do what I need: at 12:00:03pm, I want to get the OHLV candlestick values for 11am-12pm, not the current real-time quote.  Also their API allows robots to enter trailing-stop orders (unlike Schwab).

Surfing the oscillations

This week, the market fell for four days, then made almost all of it back on Friday.  It did not fall to the bottom of the channel, instead making something of a “double bottom”.  Also, it did not rise all the way to the top of the channel today.

Since the market generally continues in the same direction for the Monday and Tuesday following an NFP announcement, I expect that that IWM will hover near the top of its channel for the start of next week.  Alternative: gap up out of the channel, which would make sense if the intent is for SPY to return to its yearly high in March before crashing after the Olympics.  Only 1.5% more to go for new highs this year!

Gold trading

A wild week!  On Monday and Tuesday, it seemed that this week would end with a “buy” signal for IAU.  On Wednesday and Thursday, it seemed that this week would *not* end with a “buy”.  As of Friday’s close, the weekly MACD histogram is +0.001, which is actually a minimal “buy” signal.  But I didn’t buy.  Let’s see how next week starts out.