Friday, August 20, 2010

Reading the Tape so as to avoid losses. $AKAM

I entered thursday short the market, including a short position in $AKAM. I was not too sure about this position; $akam is a "weird" stock but $nflx was down heavily on wednesday the market was not strong so I thought maybe high beta stocks might fall.

But come thurday mornig , the market is indeed falling a lot in the pre-market, but $akam was suspiciously stable. I decided I would give $akam a very short leash; I would give it a chance to fall quickly at the beggining or else... When it showed no relative weakness in the first minutes I covered at 9.31.31 and at 9.33.26
Good thing I did , because from then on its relative performance was very stong. I use relative (to the sp500) strength often to tell me what a stock "wants" to do.