[The Big D]

I know there's nothing more annoying than a guy with a bunch of shorts spewing doom and gloom about the stock market, but I thought I would throw this out there: I trade a number of stocks based on a simple technical trend following system that typically generates trades on a multi-month time horizon. I'm equally happy with being long or short, and I do whatever the system says I should do because historically it's been right a lot more than it's been wrong. I won't reveal the details of the system, which may cause some people to disregard this post, and that's OK with me. Anyways, over the last 5-10 trading days every single stock I follow that I was previously long in has generated a signal to go short. This lockstep move is atypical in normal markets - for example for the entire summer, I had a mixed bag of long and short positions (more long than short) depending on individual stock performance. The last time it did this was late 2008 (short), and then march 2009 (long) and we know how those turned out.

So in my experience, when this happens, it means we're in for a rather substantial broader market move (this time, in the down direction). People with large long positions (via individual stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, holdings in 401Ks etc) might want to evaluate their positions.