End of Day Market Thoughts 20 May 05

Well, the market was up today again, although not irrationally bullish, but enough to irritate me (becos I was not in it... heheh). My mind seemed unable to get over the bearish 'block' that was caused by:
- selloffs just a couple of days ago, partly due to the downward revision of the singapore GDP to 2.5%.
- the Nikkei and Hang Seng fell while the US was up the night before, and SGP went down as with them.
- the STI only showed a positive reaction on 19May05 to the gains on NASDAQ after it showed 3 strong up days from 16 - 18 May 05.

Signs of bullishness:
- the STI had a doji on the 18th, forming a harami with the preceeding candle (or day or bar). Confirmation of the harami came on the 19th when the harami-high was penetrated.

Favorite buy signals not there:
- because of its reliabilty and good risk mgmt nature, the sequential breakout buy signal is my favourite and one I feel the most comfortable in buying as it reflected a gradual change in sentiment which I feel will cause the participants to push the stock longer. But it were the v-reversals that were coming out and thus made me reluctant to buy. So I'm trying to look into ways to tell/show me that:
a. sentiment has indeed turned around
b. the prior selloff (if there was any) was overdone

What I should have done:
- need to remember that the SG market at times (in fact, I've seen it happen often enough) only move after the US has ran for 2 days or more. Seems like the players need to see more proof to overcome their skepticism.... me, I think I'm more skeptical than the skeptics... heheh. So I've got to drill it into my head that the local mkt will almost always follow suit sooner or later (unless some locally specific news comes out). The Nikkei and ASX200 should provide some guidance to the direction of the day as they start trading earlier.

What I feel may happen:
- because the local mkt took some time to 'believe' its US counterpart, the local mkt might see fewer days of rally as the US side takes a breather. But then again, if the sentiment has become bullish, the local mkt will most likely still rally as long as the US remains flat.

So now I'm kicking myself for missing the move these 2 days, but it has caused me to start thinking of ways to tell if sentiment has turned around, especially for V-reversals. But the problem is that the data that I'm after is only available on that particular day after the market closes and will be written over on the new trading day... so I'm trying to use ASP.NET (i.e. using OP's server) to download and save the data on the server on a daily basis.