How to Catch a Falling Knife by the HandleI'm not suggesting here that the broader equity market is going to violently sell-off soon or anything like that. I figure that posting an idea on such a scenario might be useful just in case volatility picks up a few knots with some foreseeable seasonal headwinds.
Also, the broader equity market is probably going to sell off soon.
Now that the possibility of such an event has been thrown out there, I offer something that could make the whole experience even more fun than meme stocks. That would be the use of the 186-period exponential moving average to locate the approximate price level where the first safe area to take profits would be under a crash scenario. Typically, you don't want to "catch falling knives", or any other falling weapon because it is assumed that the trader catching said knife/weapon thinks he has caught the bottom. Of course, he has done the opposite and is in fact, holding a bag of something that will drop in value very soon and the hand he is holding it with can barely hang on because he missed the knife's handle on the way down.
While this scenario happens all too often, i believe that catching a falling knife can be done safely and profitably if using the 186 EMA and a SHORT position. What you are then catching is not the stock/derivative itself at a discount long, but rather closing out a short knife that you threw a while back for extreme profits. The key is that the 186 EMA offers you a nearly perfect target to safely exit an extreme short position, without using complicated time/price methods that are usually esoteric to some extent.
Just take a look at the chart displayed above, which offers a detailed look into the kind of weapons that SP Futures traders had to deal with over the years. To fully appreciate the results of this demonstration, you must understand the difficulty of trading this futures market. The degree of leverage is high enough to wipe out new entrants within hours and is also severe enough whereby the assumptions required to use Wave Principle cannot be relied upon.
In summary, the fact that this EMA either caught outright or was the cause of the first major bounce of ALL significant selloffs over the past 10 years is remarkable. On the weekly timeframe, it will undoubtedly prove useful for bearish swing traders using an intermediate time horizon. In a whipsaw scenario intraday, the 186 can be quickly applied in a pinch, which can prevent panic selling in all sorts of situations.
The uses for this tool are many and I am lucky to have randomly stumbled upon it about a year ago when messing around with pinescript for the first time. In fact - see for yourself how the 186 EMA somehow plays a structural role in at least one timeframe (even the 5-min at times) of any given price chart. The key is to find which timeframe the 186 is fitting most closely with at the current time.
Remember, use wisely when catching weapon-profits, not weapon-long-positions.
-PiggishMagician
AMEX:SPY
SP:SPX
GLOBALPRIME:US500
