The Nifty opened flat, went up in the first 15-20 minutes after opening but soon started coming down. The support at 3882/3878 was soon broken and it took the Nifty to make a new low at 3848 before it started moving up again. And what a rally it was! A 200 point rally in just 2 hours of trading (between 1PM and 3PM) ensued without any correction whatsoever. On the 5 minutes charts, there were only two candles during that period which had a low lower than the low of the previous candle. In the last 30 minutes the Nifty did display some resistance near 4100.
I have attached the 30 minutes chart of the Nifty today which shows the fantastic rally that took place today. There were no complaints from the rally today, except that it fell just short of confirming the uptrend. As we can see from the charts, the rally stopped exactly at the resistance line. Thankfully, the Relative Strength Index (RSI) has given an indication that the rally may go past the resistance line. It has done so by itself going above the line that was providing resistance to it. A confirmation using the trendline technique will come if the Nifty were to cross this resistance line. If we are using the Dow Theory then a short term uptrend would be confirmed only if it were to cross its most recent pivot high which lies at 4325 as shown by the dashed green line. But one should remember that would be confirmation of only a short term uptrend. An intermediate term uptrend would be confirmed only if the Nifty were to cross 4680.But why did the market bounce back today? Why were we not expecting a bounce back? Well, the answer is that’s what happens in a capitulation. The capitulation day makes the market so negative that everybody is expecting it to go down. All investors are bearish, all analysts are bearish, all charts are bearish and there is a lot of pessimism around. Though, there are signals available that capitulation is coming, yet the market decides when it has capitulated completely. As mentioned in yesterday’s post, capitulation like symptoms were visible, but I personally feel the market hasn’t completely capitulated yet. Of course, that is my personal opinion and I could be wrong too. I support my reasoning with the logic that a capitulation is much sharper and lasts much longer than what was seen in the last 3-4 days.
The main reasons why the markets went up today, in my opinion, were mainly political and also valuation based. It seems certain now that the Samajwadi Party (SP) would provide support to the government on the nuclear deal issue in case of a Left pull-out. It also seems certain that the government would not fall even if the Left pulls out and that the nuclear deal might go through. While this rally is just discounting the positive developments, we should see a big rally when the nuclear deal goes through without the government falling. Looking at the valuations, Nifty, which was trading at a P/E (Price to Earnings Ratio) of over 28 in early January was down to 16.66 yesterday (based on current earnings – Forward P/E would be even lower). The Nifty Midcap 50 Index was even more attractive. The P/E which was close to 25 in January was down to only 10.15 yesterday. And a P/E of 10-15 times is a very good level to pick up stocks. But fundamentally speaking, high crude prices and inflation still remain areas of concern.
So, what do we do? Is it a bear market rally or the beginning of a bull market? We don’t know for sure right now and the best thing to do would be to follow the market and wait for it to tell us what to do. We should go long in the short term if a short term uptrend is confirmed (with proper stop losses, of course). More positions for a longer term can then be added when an intermediate term uptrend is also confirmed. In case the market comes down without confirming an intermediate term uptrend, we would know that it was just a bear market rally.
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