Friday, August 23, 2013

Watching silver: where's the volume?

I recently put in a bottom call on silver.  While that call has held so far, I'm concerned that there has not been enough volume, no capitulation sell off, no panic.  This is what it usually takes to really put in a strong bottom leading to the next bull market.  While I am not changing my call at present, a good EW practitioner always looks for alternate wave counts that provide new trigger points for decision making.
The lower ellipse on the volume scale in the chart at left shows that volume into the declared bottom was not very good.  Thus, the next decision point for whether a bottom is really in or not still lies before us as circled in red where the chart will have to deal with a very strong downward sloping resistance.  How the chart deals with this will likely determine if there is 1 more wave down (the "e" wave of a descending horizontal triangle) or not.

If the chart breaks this upper resistance line then it should be treated as strong confirmation that the downtrend is broken and that the new uptrend is in place.  This will be especially true if the chart hits the top line in a test of it, pulls back to the 38.2 fib retracement of this 1st wave up off the bottom and then smashes through the top resistance line on high volume.  In that case the smash through would have happened on a 3rd wave up and I do feel that after such a long down trend that it will certainly take the power of a 3rd wave to break out.

If, however the resistance holds then I would expect a retracement down to about mid channel best case or to the bottom of the channel worst case before the final bottom is in.  In the case where the chart can only retrace to mid channel what we would then have would be a double bottom, or more likely, an inclining double bottom which would signal a big turn around.  Given the strong downward slope of this chart, the delta could be as much as $10 here (worst case if there was a throw under at the bottom support) but more likely the chart would simply take the last $5 bounce back giving those who didn't catch it the first time a 2nd chance.  Dollar cost averaging into the bottom is always a good strategy and that is exactly what I am doing for silver.

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