Do We Short Existing Home Sales?

It’s late Tuesday night and index futures are wafting higher, not so much propelled by buying as made temporarily weightless by the blissful absence of volume.The E-Mini S&Ps are trading 1405.00 at the moment after having failed to head-butt their way any higher than 1402.00 earlier in the day.

This suggests DaBoyz are building momentum for a short-squeeze ahead of Wednesday’s opening. They’re bound to get help when existing home sales are released, since this particular datum has quite evidently been brought to heel by Team Obama 2012.The near certainty of a bullish housing number raises the question of whether we should want to risk impeding a possible buying stampede with the short offer we’d placed earlier at 1412.75.

The answer is a qualified yes, although no longer via a straight offer at that price with the usual micro-tight stop-loss. We’d originally recommended that tactic to Rick’s Picks subscribers, along with another, more challenging, “camouflage” entry strategy that would attempt to control risk even more tightly.

The latter is generally a wise course to follow in situations where the trader could get blown out of the water for the mortal sin of having followed heart and mind rather than instinct. The three are rarely aligned, especially when stocks have spent the last three years climbing a wall of worry that might have seemed insurmountable to some.

But just as paranoids can have actual enemies, cynics who think bulls must be out of their minds can sometimes be right.Without casting aspersions on those who have been doing the buying, the cynic might also point out that rising shares have been driven less by bulls than by a tidal swell of easy money purposed to…lift asset values.And of course, cynics married to bullion would further note that the one sector - other than residential real estate - that has failed to respond to global easing is…junior mining stocks. But that’s another story for another day.However, and for what it’s worth, the Junior Gold Miner ETF (GDXJ) got so close yesterday to our downside target at 23.93 that we’re looking to bottom-fish near current levels.