Market Comments Aug. 23rd : Kill Boredom doing boring stuffs

Nothing is more boring than Market comments, those stories of past action and settled battles that only give the losers more sorrows and the winners more auto-satisfaction. We all know how the prices have progressed during the trading day, for instance we know the SPX opened at 1075 and closed at 1064 on Friday, but we DON'T know precisely WHY it occurred, we just have assumptions on the reasons of the move and those are just interpretations of the news. I believe there's a strong trading bias here. I guess most of the people believe that Trading is just about betting on news, if they're positive the price goes up otherwise it goes down. Forecast them accurately and you'll make money. Unfortunately it's not that simple. I think this belief is fed by the crowd of journalists and market commentators writing the headlines we read all day. That's their job to explain the market action and this asap after the fact and whatever happens. Some days, it really looks like the journalists have a stock of good news and a stock of bad news handy and as the market action unfolds the former or the latter feed the arguments accordingly: "The S&P 500 dropped because [bad news 1] [bad news 2] despite [good news 1] and as [bad news 3]". All in all it lets the impression that the news drive the prices, which is not always true. To say that the game of trading is about betting on the actual figures or news compared to the anticipation of the markets participants would be a better statement, but I think it's still not totally right. When the markets are in a mood to fall, they will fall whatever (OK OK almost whatever...) the news are. The only statement I'm considering true at that stage is that when there are more guys desperate to buy than guys desperate to sell, the price goes up and vice-versa.


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