Bear Flag Homework

Eric has asked that I look at the bear flags on the 2-day and 5-min interval charts, which is actually a great exercise to see if I can discern a pattern in my feeble right brain.

I could not get a 2-day interval chart, so I'm using the daily on the first exercise.  Let's first define a bear flag.  From Chart-stocks:  "Bear Flag is a sharp, strong volume decline, several days of sideways to higher price action on much weaker volume followed by a second, sharp decline to new lows on strong volume." 

SPY daily chart shows the prolonged low-volume upswing from the March lows.  The average volume has declined over these weeks.  This seems like a rather long time interval for a bear flag... big purple crayons... but it does follow the principle that buyers are losing conviction and the easy money is made, which signals that the market is ripe to roll over.

Also, there is a double top-- actually a lower high-- noted from the past two weeks.  The moving averages are showing that a snap to the downside is due.  MACD had a crossover on May 13th.  Bearish.

SPY 5-minute shows a similar pattern starting from Thursday's low and the upswing has been on low volume.  The Friday afternoon pattern shows a meandering sideways market most of the afternoon on extremely low pre-holiday volume.

Target to the downside is 84 based on a near-term high of 92.70 and the recent low of 88.40.