The Christmas Eve Selloff was a Classic Capitulation

The selloff on Christmas eve was so bad it looked like a typical bear market capitulation. The following rally merely confirmed it.
The selloff on Christmas eve was so bad it looked like a typical bear market capitulation. The following rally merely confirmed it.
October and December have been devastating for stocks. It wasn’t until Friday though that we officially reached the depths of a bear market.
Recently, while working on the Azure Data Lake R extension, I had to figure out a good way to create a zip file containing a package together with all its dependencies. This came down to understanding where does R store and search for packages. Despite the documentation, it did require additional reading and experimentation.
There are only a few well-known signals which I consider reliable. One of them is the Dow Theory. According to it, or at least to some interpretations of it, the bull market cycle almost ended this Friday.
When I wrote the original post, I wasn’t planning on writing a follow-up. Certainly not the week after. But what a difference a week can make in a dynamic system like the US stock market.
Coming back to markets and trading (after a while), the feeling has been that the markets, and the economy as a whole, are doing good. How good? Since I haven’t been following things closely, I had to do some forensics.
About a couple of years ago, I rolled out the flock package to help me synchronize R processes. I have used it ever since, but it wasn’t until recently that I found the time to move the source code to GitHub, and to add the package to CRAN.
For quite some time now I have been using R’s caret package to choose the model for forecasting time series data. The approach is satisfactory as long as the model is not an evolving model (i.e. is not re-trained), or if it evolves rarely. If the model is re-trained often – the approach has significant computational overhead. Interestingly enough, an alternative, more efficient approach allows also for more flexibility in the area of model selection.
The previous post in this series, showed a way to identify trading opportunities. The approach I implemented used time series daily data to identify good entry points in terms of risk-reward. The natural next step is to try to make use of these opportunities using machine learning.
One approach to trading which has been puzzling me lately, is to sit and wait for opportunities. 🙂 Sounds simplistic, but it is indeed different than, for instance, the asset allocation strategies. In order to be able to even attempt taking advantage of these opportunities, however, we must be able to identify them. Once the opportunities are identified – we can try to explain (forecast) them using historical data.