Today was a very strange trading day. The PPT are really getting their act together and will not let the tape go where it seems to want to go. If you were trading or watching the action you saw how fast things moved to the downside when they did go. Then the move petered out and rose on a no volume candle and drifted upwards. The downward moves show me where the power is but these days you must remember there are forces that I believe are stopping it from finding its level.
Throughout my trading career I have never traded on news or tips or have expectations. My current feeling that the market is like an drunken, blindfolded elephant balancing on a 10ft. pole is due to the underlying conditions.
I trade on the candles, momentum and gut feeling. these have served me well for eight years through up, down and sideways markets. Today however I got the feeling that my edge is being marginalized by the unnatural forces propping up the markets. Things are not following through as they have done 1000s of times before.
I am always more than happy to follow the manipulators in either direction but the tape action today was ultra difficult. No big losers, no big winners but just a lot to starts and stops. Scalping mode was about the only technique that paid off today but that gets tedious pretty quickly.
Hopefully the action will show itself a bit more direction up or down in the coming days. Until then I will be playing the pops and pullbacks more aggressively to get a jump on the micro trends available. Or maybe just take a holiday and wait it out.
Regardless of what my post below says it wasn't all doom and gloom. Here are a few trades that worked as normal. 
covered TNA after a good run
