We've Only Just Begun

I am strolling through the charts and seeing areas of the market that haven't even completed tops yet. It took 5 minutes of looking at charts to find these, this is the top of my giant pile of charts. And by top, I don't mean the best, though some are great. I mean I made it through only a sliver of all my watchlists and had enough charts for a short video.

All My Positions

I have short positions of varying size on all of these. In terms of number of options, XLP is by far the largest position. By dollar size, CME, APPL, MCD, SHW are relatively large. If I group together all my energy positions XLE, COP and USO, that would be larger than everything, but some of these are weekly puts that I may take off early next week if crude doesn't dip quickly. XLP puts are cheaper though, and thus I anticipate they could be my largest position at the conclusion.

Update: I forgot to list BITI calls, a short position on BTC.

Horizontals Getting Tagged

Support Breaks Galore

Gold hasn't broken yet. Commodities are relatively strong today, I'm down on XLE, FCX and DOW puts. I bought 1 DTE GDX puts in case gold does break though.

Visa and Mastercard look like ServiceNow because they're all in the tech sector. I'm not sure if V and MA will pull tech down, or vice versa, but it's kind of a weird sector with two stocks tied to the consumer and interest rates in with tech companies.

Visa: Time to Die

If there's no rally, Visa will fail right here. A rally probably carries it up to around $235, depending on how the consumer fares. Consumer stocks may not do well if the market is focused on a recession-driven Fed pivot. Update: Visa is already breaking out in pre-mnarket.

Cashed Up for the Week

I'm long GDX, TLT. Have some puts on AMR riding the Spruce Capital play. Otherwise mostly cash. Will be looking to add consumer finance shorts this week, DFS looking like my first choice. I keep going back to the well on MA, V, MCD, POOL those are all going to be beauteous shorts at some point. Eyeing XLE, SMH for sectors. Still like crypto carnage plays like SBNY. Also looking at adding ZN (futures) calls way out in December.

The S&P 500 could get to 4100 area. Not a forecast, but I'm watching to see how the market reacts. If the lows aren't taken out, odds of a bounce increase.

BTC could run to $40,000 in a general bounce.

The ES is lokoing diamondy this morning. The move out of this pattern should be a powerful one.

My read in the very short-term is the bears have to put up or shut up. They take out the lows and the bottom drops out on this market, or the bulls are going to meander this higher with or without a squeeze. It doesn't mean the low is in, only that this potential breakdown moment has passed.

Easter Charts

Consumer Credit

Only a Matter of Time

Until you need a UnionPay card to travel internationally.

Reuters: Russian banks rush to switch to Chinese card system

You might think who cares, but when push comes to shove, nations will be forced to choose which system they will use. If a nation knows it will lose tourist money one way or another, it will choose to lose the least amount. There will be outliers. Perhaps Vietnam will choose the West, even if it is the worse economic choice, because they value sovereignty more. Maybe Thaliand can remain independent and doesn't have to choose. Otherwise, I expect much of Asia will be closed to Westerners who don't have UnionPay cards. Should the U.S. dollar collapse, much of the world may be closed to Visa and Mastercard.

Everywhere You Want to Short

Visa Now

Visa

Rainmaker Trade for February

It's everywhere bears want to be. Support line from 2009 busted, rolling top and an island breakaway on Monday that has held until today. A gap fill would take it above $205, but I would be aggressively shorting at that level assuming the overall market isn't in bull mode.

Visa

The blue line is support all the way back to the 2009 low. The line held in March 2020. It was broken in early December. I think it will fail this year.

Visa Breached Long-Term Support

The Destruction of Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

WashEx: Amazon to ban Visa credit cards in United Kingdom

Amazon announced Wednesday it will no longer accept Visa credit cards issued in the United Kingdom starting January, citing high transaction fees charged by the company .

The news comes after the U.K.'s departure from the European Union, which got rid of mandated caps on credit card transaction fees. Amazon said consumers are still allowed to use Visa debit cards, Eurocards, Mastercards , and American Express cards.

...“The cost of accepting card payments continues to be an obstacle for businesses striving to provide the best prices for customers. These costs should be going down over time with technological advancements, but instead they continue to stay high or even rise," an Amazon spokesperson told MarketWatch . "As a result of Visa's continued high cost of payments, we regret that Amazon.co.uk will no longer accept UK-issued Visa credit cards as of 19 January, 2022."

Blockchain replaces network fees that are percentages of transactions with fees the run into the ones of pennies. Amazon is being aggressive now because it can. This is the start of a major trend.

Chartwise, Visa is approaching the bottom of its channel. Mastercard has further to go. If support is lost, it may be time to aggressively short. After the credit card companies, the big target for blockchain will be Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, Google and their cloud services.

I'm not really sure why they qualify, but Mastercard and Visa are top-10 components of the S&P 500 Technology sector. They combine for 5.8 percent of assets. The story here is the narrowing of the bull market. Short opportunitues grow, even as the headline indexes make new highs.

Short Everything

Good spots. Good risk reward, no room for increase with many stocks at resistance levels. Lots of downside potential with sentiment at extremes and people believeing there's no way the market can go down because Federal Reserve. Below charts aren't necessarily the best. It is a target rich environment, find your favorite sector and dig into the holdings. ARKK remains a target rich environemnt.