Late Day Surge Doesn't Help To Establish Direction

While the move down Friday morning may have violated trendlines some technicians drew on their charts, it did not signal a break for either of the triangle testing methods I laid out last week. For violations to be official I currently would need to see one of the following: 1316.75 broken on the downside for method #1, 1369.23 on the upside for method #1, or 1367.94 to the upside or 1327.04 to the downside for method #2. Therefore, as per the studies, we are still waiting for a break to look to fade. The studies on Thursday night suggested fading the breakout could be the highest-odds play.

While it failed to move the S&P 500 out of its range, the action Friday certainly wasn’t mundane. A late-day reversal led to a sizable upside surge – moving the indices from squarely negative to squarely positive. I decided to look and see whether past late-day surges had led to a directional edge over the days following. Looking back 30 years I was only able to find 22 other times where the S&P 500 gained over 1.5% in the last hour of trading. Results following those instances were mixed. Over the next one and two days the market closed higher 10 of 22 times. Over 3 and 5 day periods the market increased 14 times. Looking our further (10, 15, 20 days) results were close to a coin flip. The win/loss ratio in all these instances was close to 1 as well.

In other words – the late day surge on Friday seems to have no predictive value when looking out over the next few days. All it managed to do was put the market squarely back in the middle of its range. Traders with time-frames longer than intraday may want to continue to wait for a range resolution before getting aggressive.