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"Missing" P&F Reversals

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Q: On February 5th, 2009 the S&P 500 index reversed down to 832.23 yet your P&F chart did not show the reversal.  Why?


A: The rules for updating P&F charts are very specific and they can frequently lead to confusion like this.  When updating a chart, the first thing you do is you look to see if you can fill more boxes in the current column.  If you can, you do - and then you stop.  It doesn't matter where the stock actually ends up at the end of the day.  You only reverse into a new column if you can't fill any more boxes in the current column.

On Wednesday, $SPX quickly moved up from 837.50 to over 850.  Later in the day it fell back and ended up closing around 832.  While the decline to 832 is what people focus on when looking at a bar/candlestick chart, its the rise to 850 that the P&F chart reflects.  That rise caused two more boxes to be filled in with green X's on the chart above.  Again, as soon as those boxes were filled, we had to stop updating the chart.


Of course, the reversal showed up the very next day:

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While this might seem like a needless delay of the obvious, it is possible that the reversal would never appear on the chart at all - if $SPX had risen back above 855 on Thursday, the reversal would not have happened.

Chip Anderson
About the author: is the founder and president of StockCharts.com. He founded the company after working as a Windows developer and corporate consultant at Microsoft from 1987 to 1997. In this blog, Chip shares his tips and tricks on how to maximize the tools and resources available at StockCharts.com, and provides updates about new features or additions to the site. Learn More
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