Upward pressure continues to build despite the bears
Everything in the tape is telling me that the bears are now at a point where they are living day to day. Their strategy is to stop any obvious break out signals at all costs. If there is a break out signal their strategy is to attempt to negate it at all costs. A simple example would be a close above a key moving average. They do not want any momentum to build for this stock. They have absolutely zero control over Treaty's success in the oil field, hence they have to concentrate on manipulating the tape and bombing the message boards.
However, even with their efforts to destroy the stock, the price movement in the past couple of weeks has shown that all they can do at this point is slow progress. This is like when a team is probably going to win the football game but rather than conceding their opponent uses all their time outs to delay the inevitable.
Anyone who has watched the tape recently knows that the stock really wants to close above the moving averages, and that eventually it will, but every day that it doesn't is another day alive for the bears. However, by trying to jam the short term indicators, the bears are ironically creating even stronger longer term indicators that will invite even bigger money to jump on board.
The two biggest ones are as follows. First, the higher low pattern which I talked about on my Thursday and Friday post. The recent low for the stock was put in on 10/22. If you connect that price with the June low you will get the low from last week which preceded the Friday pop. I have traded that pattern in penny land this year multiple times for big gains and it is a very slow moving but high percentage pattern.
The second pattern which spells big trouble for the bears is the MACD leading the price. In an earlier post I emphasized how the MACD cross over lead the last 6 rallies in a row. It came as no surprise when I saw the bears attempt to stuff the cross overs and also bad mouth it over on iBash. But pay attention to how the MACD put in a low in Mid September, just about a full month before the October 22nd bottom. The bears might be able to manipulate a few data points here and there, but the MACD has led the rally in TECO going back to April 2011 and now it has been trending up for a full 2 months in a row.
I'll close out with an anology. There is a lot of pressure building under ground, and it starts to come out of one crevice. The bears don't like it so they stuff that crevice to prevent a leak. That stopped a leak for one day but in the mean time the pressure continues to build. The next day another couple of crevices start to leak, so the bears go stuff both of them. The next day several crevices are leaking, so the bears stuff them and cover the area with reinforced concrete. However, there are a lot of things going on subsurface chemically and the pressure continues to build with nowhere to go but up, and so the pressure finds the weakest spot in the pavement and starts to wedge itself in and leak out again. This time, however, the bears can't plug the leak and it just keeps getting bigger.
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/cjQtN.png[/IMG]
