Those of you who follow the blog regularly know that we at NiftyScalper have been working on creating tools to look at NIFTY Market Internals as a way of understanding the index moves better.

In this post I will spend some time on one aspect which if learnt can make a massive difference in your p/l.

We will look at understanding what is a Pullback and how do we know that its not going to turn into a Reversal.

What is a Pullback?

A pullback is a micro-counter-trend within a macro trend. Micro and Macro are time references, and for scalpers and day traders it can be 5 to 10 mins for Micro and 45 to 60 minutes for macro.

Pullbacks can be great opportunities to scalp so long as the macro trend continues.

What is a Reversal?

A reversal is a move which starts like a micro-counter-trend move, however does not go back to the initial macro trend and can potentially be the beginning of a counter-macro-trend.

I don’t want to hear your stories as to how many times what you thought was a pullback turned into a reversal, and that was the end of it, for some people I know that was the end of their trading account. Especially if you don’t have your stops in place instead have ‘hope’.

Given such grave and potentially devastating outcomes of what was essentially a misread price pattern, we at NiftyScalper thought why not check if Market Internals can help us with increasing our odds of identifying ‘potential’ reversals.

If you have questions about the market internals based indicator that I am referencing here, read this post.

Look at this image below. If you notice from the point which I have marked with a blue dot, the % of stocks below 1SD of VWAP which is the red line has been inching up, along with price also rising, almost crossing over the green line (% of stocks above 1SD of VWAP). Which is obviously a sort of divergence. From that point onwards, I would be wary of pullbacks as the strength of the move, in terms of the number of stocks supporting it is waning. So this was one way of looking at it.

Lets look at this next chart, same day, same time frame. The blue dot is a common time reference across both charts.

The Red and Green line here are from a slightly different Market Internals indicator where we look at Standard Deviations from a 45 Minute Mean Price. As you can clearly see here, this one is far more pronounced, the % of stocks above 1SD of 45 Min Mean has been downward sloping as the price makes new highs and peaks.

You can see or yourself, as the support from internals declines, the probability of a pullback being just a pullback also declined.

To me it looks like there is a story here, something to follow up on.

I will keep you all posted. Till then Trade safe folks!