Volume and Volatility: How the "Slope of Hope" Is Failing the Market

Chris Johnson

On Saturday around noon, I plopped onto the couch with my dogs and grabbed the clicker to flip through the endless channels.

Eventually, I wound up on a just-started airing of "Ghostbusters," my least favorite Bill Murray movie. (And now many of you are mad at me. For what it's worth, "Caddyshack" is my favorite.)

In an odd bit of cosmic fate, a quote from the movie described exactly what I want to see from the market before I'm ready to buy bullish positions by the armfuls again.

First, let me make this known: I don't like winter. It's cold outside in Cincinnati, and my Saturday mornings and afternoons are suddenly vacant as college football takes a break between the regular season and bowl season.

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Of course, the annual Army-Navy Game was played this past Saturday. However, that was just one lonely football game floating in the space previously occupied by dozens of games, totaling nearly one hundred hours of football. But I digress…

This turn of events led me to re-watching "Ghostbusters" until said Army-Navy game started. Toward the end of the movie, the ghost-fighting team is in City Hall, trying to explain to the mayor that the city is headed toward disaster: fire and brimstone, forty years of darkness, the dead rising, et cetera.

Finishing off the colorful language to describe the peril, Peter Venkman (Murray) says, "… human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!"

And that's exactly what the market needs right now.

"Wait, wait, wait, CJ, you can't mean that seriously, right?"

But I do, and here's why…

Chris Johnson

About the Author

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Chris Johnson is a quant - he's obsessed with building and perfecting mathematical models that allow him to predict, with startling accuracy, the direction of the markets, entire sectors, and individual securities. For the last year, he's been researching and building a new system that lets him move swiftly in and out of the hottest stocks in the market for life-changing gains - entirely on his own terms. The results of his newly-minted Night Trader system are nothing short of amazing.

Chris also contributes to Money Morning as the Quant Analysis Specialist.

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