The spring sprung

Our "coiled spring" is now broken--to the downside. That's not good if you're a bull.

Today's action was difficult for me to trade. For the most part I avoided dumb impulsive trades. I didn't make money on any of the 5 trades I took today (the red arrow is one of the short trades that I made and stopped out). My chart on Tradestation didn't look as bad as the one above does. Today was much more choppy than I realized.

The blue dotted line at the bottom is the low of November 2008 (on a closing basis). You can see how the bears kept pushing us to the breaking point, but we didn't manage to bust through until the close. That makes tomorrow an interesting proposition. Will the bulls see this as reaching "capitulation" and try and take over, or will the bears see this as the bulls giving up and push the market down further?

I've included a bonus "narrow candle" chart for a trade that I didn't take today on EOG. If you would have sold short when the narrow 9:30 candle got broken (red arrow) with a stop above (orange dotted line) you would have made 2.7 times what you risked.

There weren't a lot of trades out there today after that awful gap down. Tomorrow should be interesting.