Video duration: 12min 22sec
Trading room breaking news
What’s the news? I don’t know, and I don’t care, but it’s certainly a good bar for the bears. You’ve got a Head and Shoulders Top – left shoulder, head, right shoulder. I did nothing here, and I was too slow to sell that. That happened too quickly, so right now I’m trapped out. Obviously some news event. Then we got down to the six low. Remember, we got a spike pullback channel, so the beginning of the channel is always a magnet. The market usually tries to get down there, and when it does, more often than not the market enters a Trading Range. The bears are hoping that this is a spike down and the start of a bear trend, but we’ll see.
As you know, I think the market’s going down below 2600. I did not buy puts yesterday, but I did go short, so I am currently short. There are different ways to go short. Many, many ways to go short. You can sell individual stocks, you can short futures, you can buy puts, and you can buy inverse ETFs like the SDS and the QID. I went short via ETFs yesterday. Here’s the SDS. I did buy the SDS yesterday, which is basically an inverse SPDR with two times the leverage, so I’m looking for a bounce maybe up to this gap, so to around 30. Also bought the QID just in case there’s a surprise move in tech. Maybe we’ll get to 20, 21, somewhere up in there.
We’re falling far below the six low, so there’s obviously some news event. Difficult to sell when the bars are this big because your stop is up here, so you’re risking 40 points. That’s $2,000 a contract in the Emini. In a situation like that, a lot of traders do not want to sell at the low because you can easily bounce 10 or 15, 20 points, and then enter a Trading Range and never get back down here. But some traders will sell a 50% pullback. That’s 50% right at yesterday’s high. That’s no coincidence. The low is exactly where it is, for whatever reason, at the midpoint at the sixth low and yesterday’s close.
Better to be patient here. Market’s moving too fast for you to make appropriate decisions. Sometimes you miss great moves, and that’s okay. You’re human, and you have to deal with the limitations. You can only think so fast. You can only click buttons so fast. I never worry about missing trades. I miss trades every day, lots and lots of trades. All I care about is, when I take a trade, was it reasonable, and am I managing the trade correctly? That’s all I care about. I have a strong belief that if you do those two things, that is the best way to make a living as a trader.
Remdesivir news — failed test in China
Richard just sent me a note saying that the Remdesivir antiviral drug failed in a test in China. It failed to improve symptoms. Part of the rally over the past couple of weeks or over the past week has been because of that study from the University of Chicago last week saying that Remdesivir helped severe cases of coronavirus.
Afterwards, if you were in the room last week, you heard me say that doctors lie. We already know lawyers and politicians lie, and pretty much everybody lies in business. I worked at the University of Chicago for 7 years, I taught at UCLA, I taught at Emory University, and I’ve had a lot of – plus I’ve talked nationally for years as a medical scientist, so I have a lot of personal experience with medical science.
Medical science — too many dishonest doctors
One of the reasons why I’m a day trader is because I was shocked that so many doctors would, to put it politely, spin, and some of them just outrightly – they just lied. They just openly, repeatedly lied at national conferences. I felt dirty being in that kind of an environment. I didn’t want to be around dishonest people. So I was disillusioned, and that is part of the reason why I left medicine, and certainly the main reason why I left medical science. I felt like there were too many dishonest people in it.
So last week, I said that even though my alma mater, University of Chicago, came out with results that made Remdesivir sound like it was going to be successful, I said that in medicine, very often you’ll get a study like that, an initial study like that, and the school, the hospital, and the doctors all become famous, and they’re hoping that – it’s more hope than reality.
So in part you can call it lying, you can call it spinning, but it’s not a controlled study. There are human biases, and they can give the drug to certain patients and not other patients, patients that they subconsciously think will have a better chance of surviving, with or without the drug, and then do not give the drug to patients who have no hope. So it’s really easy to unintentionally skew the result. It’s also possible to exaggerate the result.
As I’ve said, I’ve seen doctors outright lie – doctors I am working with, and I’m part of the study, and then when they go out and talk, they’re lying. They’re just outright lying. Because of that, I said that just because the study looked promising from the University of Chicago, does not mean it’s true. It could be – like I said, it could be a fluke, a statistical fluke; 1 chance out of 20, something that’s statistically significant is not significant. It’s just a random error. It could be doctors interpreting the results wrong, it could be doctors spinning the results, and it could be doctors lying. All of those things make an initial report suspicious.
What happens is a lot of other people are doing similar projects. If they do not duplicate the results, they’re going to be quick to announce that “my results don’t match yours.” In other words, they’re saying “you’re a liar,” and because they know their results do not match yours and they know you’re lying, they’re very confident that a third or a fourth group is going to validate what they’re saying and agree that yes, you are a liar.
So it’s not like you get one liar and then a second and third institution will also lie. That doesn’t happen. You get the first liar, and then everybody else is eager to prove the guy is a liar so that they can be the hero. So that’s why you wait for three or four studies coming up with the same conclusion.
Hydroxychloroquine
The same thing happened with hydroxychloroquine, you know? You get one guy doing it, and my assumption always is when the first report comes out one way and the other reports come out the other way, my first assumption from personal experience is the guy is a liar. Although, as I said, 1 chance in 20 it’s just purely statistical that – you throw a deck of cards up in the air and all 52 land face up. That doesn’t mean you have some special ability; it just means that if you do it enough, it’s going to happen. When you’re doing a scientific test, sometimes you’re going to get results that are purely statistical aberrations way out by the bell curve and not significant.
So you cannot assume that one result is significant. But if you throw the cards up in the air 20 times in a row and they all turn up face up, I’m going to believe you have some trick or some special skill, right? But if you do it once, I’m going to believe that it’s a fluke.
So that’s why you want to see three or four studies and you want to see more elaborate studies, controlled studies, control groups, blind studies, where the patient doesn’t know if he has a placebo or the real drug, the doctor does not know if the patient has the placebo or the real drug. There’s some researcher in a lab attaching code numbers to bottles and giving them to the doctor. Half of the bottles have the drug, half of the bottles have placebo, and the patient and the doctor do not know which is which, and then the doctor comes up with his results, analyzing, did the drug help or hurt?
Double-blind studies
That’s called a double-blind study. The doctor is blind, the patient is blind. Only some nerd in a room with a computer and a printer, printing out labels and attaching them to the bottles, knows. But that guy doesn’t know which patient is getting the drugs either. But when the results come in, the doctor will say, “Jar #47, good. Jar #93, bad.” And then the researcher in the room looks at the list and does the math. Did the drug clearly help, or was it no different from the group of placebo jars?
So that’s why, when you see idiots go on TV and say, “Take hydroxychloroquine” or “Take Remdesivir,” they’re idiots. They’re doing it for personal benefit, not because they care about patients. If you care about patients, you rely on science, and science requires multiple preliminary tests like this China test and the University of Chicago test, and then, ultimately, a double-blind study. You need one or more double-blind studies, or a double-blind study conducted at many institutions with many different doctors. That is a very reliable indicator of whether or not a drug is helpful, and we do not have that yet with anything to do with COVID-19, the coronavirus pandemic.
So that is my lecture on medical results and the importance of science in deciding whether you should use a certain drug or a certain disease.
Closing chart commentary
So, we’ve got a Micro Double Bottom, 40, 41. We’ve got a failed breakout of the 18 bar low. But just breaking below the 18 bar low automatically makes it only a 20% chance we get back above the high. But this is a mess. Huge down, huge up, big confusion, so really hard to do anything.
60-minute Moving Average, we’re testing the 60-minute Moving Average support. You can see on the 60-minute chart, we poked below the 60-minute Moving Average. Bulls are trying to hold. They’re trying to go up, and bears obviously would like it to fail and form a head and shoulders top. Right shoulder, head, and left shoulder. After a Wedge, you often get that. I still think it’s more likely than not that we’re going up for one more new high, and there’s only one reason I say that. It is this right here. Weekly chart. We’re very close to the 20-week Moving Average. Did not get there. We probably have to get there. So this week probably will remain an inside bar, a High 1 bull flag, and what the bulls hope is a bull trend. We break above the 20-week Moving Average next week and reverse down with a big tail on top, and then we begin a 2 to 3 week correction down below 2600, and maybe 2500.
