TraderWise

I’ve written often about the value of changing routines. Eliminating a routine that involves spending money needlessly, or substituting a different routine that involves spending less money, is a great way to cut your spending.

In fact, any time you make a choice to reduce your spending, you’re taking a powerful step in a financially healthy direction.

But it’s just a single step. Alone, reducing spending cannot bring about positive financial change in your life.

If you see a potential Bull Flag setting up, do you know how to project the Profit Target?  Let’s use Friday’s intraday action and the bull flag that set-up mid-day to learn how to find the price projection point of a Measured Move or Bull Flag.

I recently highlighted the “Bull Flag Formation in the US Dollar Index” on January 18th (see prior post), and now that we have successfully broken higher confirming the bull flag, it’s time to take an updated view of the daily US Dollar Index chart to take a look at a “bump in the road” that must be overcome to complete the full target.

Let’s see that now.

The market appears to be coming back into ‘payout’ mode, as classic patterns and set-ups are working like clockwork.  It’s noon EST and we just witnessed a successful filled gap, support bounce as expected, and a complete bull flag.  Let’s see these all.

DIA 5-min Chart:

Normally I wait until the end of the day to post intraday summaries but I couldn’t pass this up.

Let’s take a quick look at the daily chart of Gold to note a recent “Bull Flag” pattern, and also revisit the “Triangle” breakout pattern that triggered as a potential set-up in early September.  We’ll note two potential upside targets if these are the dominant technical price patterns in gold.

Taking a quick look at these two patterns, let’s start first with the “Bull Flag” that is playing out currently.

Financial stocks have been showing relative strength as of late during the recent market rally.  I wanted to call attention to Prudential Financial Securities (PRU) to show a classic example of a Bull Flag measured move example worth nothing.

Prudential Financial (PRU) Daily Chart:

Here’s a quick reminder about tonight’s free trading webinar, as I would love to see you there if possible.

Chart Reading with TheStockBandit

I’m excited to run through a number of interesting chart setups, from both the bullish and bearish sides, in order to teach you some concepts and of course put some quality plays on your radar.

After completing a perfect bull flag (in pure text-book example) as expected, the US Dollar Index is now forming a bearish ’sell’ signal at the target of $80.50, which is worth our attention.

Pardon the purposeful alliteration, but let’s look at the Daily Dollar Doji Sell Signal:

The Bull Flag target  has long-been the $80.50 level, and now we’re seeing a short-term sell-signal in the form of a doji candle at the upper Bollinger Band on the daily chart.

Consider how the markets traded today:

* Treasury prices were up; yields were lower

* Stocks continued their tumble into the trading range of late 2008

* Commodity prices fell; most notably oil

* Consumer discretionary shares underperformed consumer staples stocks

* Financial and housing stocks underperformed the broad market