From Slope of Hope:
I received an interesting email last night which was a forwarded warning from CITI to clients warning of a triangle on the Vix suggesting that the Vix might spike to new high very soon while equities fell hard accordingly:
Obviously this was potentially very interesting, and I had a look at the Vix chart. I could see no triangle. However I did see a rectangle and suspect that the setup seen by chartists at CITI was lost in translation as they tried to explain to to non-chartists there. I'll show the rectangle on the 60min, and the target on an upside breakout would be in the 55.50 area, which would indeed be a major move.
The rectangle is a bottoming rectangle, which has only a 45% chance of breaking up, but with an 80% chance on making target on an upside break. Under the current circumstances though an upside breakout looks (from a TA perspective) a lot more likely than a downside breakout, and I've noticed in the past that these rectangle bottoms tend to break up if the decline into the rectangle was small, as in this case:
It's the last day of the month today of course, and the SPX would need to rally to 1206 to close over the monthly 20SMA. That seems unlikely. I showed the chart for this yesterday and you can see that here. This has important implications as in the last two bear markets after the monthly close below the 20SMA, that moving average was an impenetrable ceiling until the start of the next bull market, being retested only once in each of the last two bear markets before further declines....MORE
