What a day for equities, just when you think you know what’s happening and a 5% drop on the FTSE 100 catches you by surprise. I know today’s US retail sales slumping 2.7% for December was bad but I wasn’t expecting a 6% drop on the FTSE (Low of 4115). I took profits today on all my shorts as I’m not comfortable running shorts this close to the Obama inauguration. The beige book didn’t add much cheer with continued deterioration over the last six weeks. I read a funny name for the unholy spawn of JP Morgan and Citygroup “City Morg”. It’s always good to laugh otherwise you would cry.

Meanwhile in other mediocre news CNBC are doing “Madoff Watch” where they have poor Roberta Combs standing outside his flat awaiting any move. Who cares? The justice system will hopefully wake up and do what they are paid to do, justice.

For my part I think we may have more selling tomorrow but an uptrend to come next week. Tomorrow and Friday have a lot of news flow going on so further percentage fluctuations could occur. I am mostly neutral but have undertaken a small buy on the FTSE 100. This is because I believe a bounce will occur and even a small correction after the heavy selling today. I’m keeping stops close.

My next big more will be shorting the Obama rally as per the last post. Best of luck out there, we are going to all need it.

I think we have established a short term trend between 5500 and 5400. My hope is by openly stating this we break the trend and head either up or down. I don’t care just do something. If we move up I will go short over 5500 and if not I’m not too sure where I stand. My downward conviction is quite strong but at these levels we are very near the lows of the year.

Interestingly the DOW pushed well into bear territory yesterday but if we get another rally today this will lead to more uncertainty. My ideal scenario is down 100, down 150, up 30 and down 200. That would give us the kind of downward momentum we need to sustain this clean out.

This idealistic thinking doesn’t help me now and with no positions open my fear is that I miss a big swing. My mistake was not placing a 2.50 sell yesterday as the FTSE closed at 5512. I need to start evaluating where to go from here.