Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Shorting Weakness - Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (Public, NYSE:LEH)

Last week I mentioned this symmetrical triangle on the LEH daily chart. This morning's weakness in the broker sector pre-market, was the perfect catalyst for a BO.

This trade got off to a very slow start compared to UBS, JPM and MS, the news makers. Over time, it became obvious that the slowness was due to the stair step pattern of decent which involves a lot of NR consolidation as each step develops along the way.


NDAQ caught my eye last night as I was doing my EOD review. The trend line breach after such a bullish run, could signal a pullback. It carved out a clean base & break short.



RIMM triggered a short as the markets broke down in the latter part of the session.

I was watching the Emini NASDAQ futures all day for a trend line break, but the action was so sloppy that I ended up shorting the S&P futures instead.

2 comments:

Jon said...

Just curious, how are you able to short LEH? Do you not have the naked short restrictions?

TJ said...

Jonathan,

Naked shorts would be shorting without borrowing shares. Not too sure how that works exactly, but with IB, they don't allow it. In other words, IB had shares available for shorting LEH.