The Weekly Trade 4/20

As post options ex week begins the SPX finds itself sitting right at very critical resistance, the 875 area. We nudged up against it in Friday's trading then pulled back a smidge in the last hour. The high on the ES futures was 872. This rally we have had since early March was way overdue as I stated on March 5. I have been expecting this market to rally up to test the 875 mark for weeks and have said that this rally is different than the others. And so far it has been. The SPX is up 31% in 6 weeks. With many banks even tripling or quadrupling in that time.

I think the major test of this market will be if it can cross the 875-880 level. This was the high from late January and early Feb. It will be interesting to see if the market can overcome this hurdle. If so, I believe the SPX can be at 930 by May. The downtrending 200 day ema on the SPX is up around 962 right now and the 20 day ema just recently crossed above the slower 50 day ema. Something that hasn't occurred since about one year ago to the day.

Economic data this week is light and includes:

Monday- Leading Indicators

Thursday- Jobless Claims, Existing Home Sales

Friday- Durable Orders, New Home Sales

The story of the week should be focused on earnings as many important tech companies are reporting including: AAPL, IBM, MSFT. Also several Dow components will be reporting.

For Monday I will start out neutral and let the market tell me where it wants to go. The pivot point is at 865.25 and price is selling off a bit below that this evening. I would like to see the 60min SPX chart to remain uptrending to maintain my bullishness but if the pivot is lost then the next logical place they sell it down to is the low 850s. Of course if we stay over the pivot then I think we can test that 875 mark once again. If that is broken to the upside, watch out above.