2025-01-02 - priceactiontds - daily update - wti crude oilGood Evening and I hope you are well.
tl;dr
oil - Neutral. 4th consecutive bull bar on the daily chart and it’s the biggest of the 4. We are close to a bear trend line from the triangle (depending on how you want to draw it) and I rather think this is the climactic end of the rally for now and we pull back more. I can be totally wrong and market breaks above the trend line to retest the August high above 76 but trend lines are support/resistance until broken. Neutral because I think it’s too high to buy and too early to short. The close above 73 was really strong though.
comment: Bulls with a strong break above the November high and they closed above 73. We are now in a dead zone between 72.35 and 74 (or the area around the bear trend line). We could see a bigger pull-back down to 72 or 71 before we test the bear trend line. Longs in the dead zone are bad trades, no matter how you put it. I do think the breakout is strong enough to wait for pull-backs and go long then.
current market cycle: trading range
key levels: 71 - 74
bull case: Bulls have all the arguments on their side now but buying this close to the bear trend line is probably unwise. Many bulls will probably want to see a decent pull-back and form a better channel up. Any pull-back should stay above 70/71 though or more could see it as a bull trap like all other highs above 72 were for 3 months now.
Invalidation is below 71.
bear case: Bears had to give up once market continued above 72.35. Can they hold short and scale in higher with a stop 78? Not really. They will never reach even 1x their risk, so we will probably have to wait and see where the interest in buying vanishes and market stalls. Bears want to start shorting as close to the bear trend line as possible and if we just use the July & October highs, we could go up to 75. Bears really don’t have much here. Best they can hope for is to stall the market below 75 and wait for more bulls to take profits.
Invalidation is above 74.
short term: Bullish. Buying near the 2h 20ema or most recent bull trend line is reasonable. Targets above are 74 and maybe 75. I will wait for a better pull-back to buy.
medium-long term - Update from 2025-01-02: Still no better medium-long term outlook to write about. The triangle has been going on for so long, it’s highly unlikely that we will break above it.
current swing trade: Nope
trade of the day: Long since 10 a.m. CET. Strong 1h bull bar closing at the high tick and immediate follow through. Market never looked back.
