Tim Walker

When I first started out as a trader, with my Smarter Starter Pack under my belt, there was one thing I conspicuously lacked. That was a view of the bigger picture. I was picking good-looking ABC trades, but I wasn’t looking at them in the context of what was going on in the overall market. Nor was I looking at a broader perspective in the stock I was considering. This caused me to take trades that I should have been avoiding.

What do you think of when you see ABC Points on a chart? Very probably, you look at it as a potential trade, and then proceed to evaluate its strength or weakness. However, there is another very powerful use for ABC Points, and that is to give potential prices where moves may end and the trend may turn. As usual we will illustrate by looking at Santos (STO:ASX).

When we last left Santos (STO:ASX) in Issue 309, it had suffered a significant sell-off in the aftermath of a 2-day trading halt due to a capital raising. The market was clearly oversold after falling 14.5% from the close of trading on 8 May to the close on 14 May. It then came back and made a first higher bottom on the 1-Day Swing Chart. I finished the analysis with the words, ‘this is yet again a time to watch this market carefully for a signal.’

In recent articles I have been illustrating some of the difficulties that a market can present in trading, and Santos (STO:ASX) has been giving more than a few of them lately! In Issue 305 I showed a weekly chart which had the market sitting on the mid-point of the range from the June 2008 all-time high and the October 2008 low. At the time, I said that we needed to wait for a signal from the market, either that it was going to hold above the 50% level or that it was going to head lower. Chart 1 updates this earlier chart.