Calculating the Weekly Expected Move is the first step in your trading plan for the week ahead. The move defines the macro sandbox for daytime frame trading during the week. It is your Sunday project.
The Weekly Expected Move gives you invaluable information about the overbought or oversold nature of the index in initiating trades and taking profits throughout the week. The market will stay within the boundaries 70% of the time.
I like to divide the weekly range into quartiles and generally look to initiate my long day trades when the index is in the first WEM quartile (shaded green) and target profits in the last quartile (colored red). Shorts are just the reverse.
It is also acceptable to divide the range into thirds. Whatever works for you is OK, as long as you understand the concept.
Of course, whether to focus on longs or shorts depends on context. Taking trades between the shaded boxes depends on the circumstances as well. But the closer you get to the middle when initiating a trade, the more likely you might be starting transactions in no man’s land.
Naturally, you can manage a trade initiated in the red or green zone through the middle. It depends on your target, and you can always trail a stop.
Knowing the range also helps you identify other key levels you may encounter as they travel inside the sandbox during the week. You can focus on the most likely moving averages, support, resistance levels, etc., where your trade might stall or change direction.
For the most part, you can ignore potential happenings outside the top of the red shaded boundary and the bottom of the green shaded edge, which are the maximum endpoints of the expected move.
The Weekly Expected Move sets the edges where Dealers and Market Makers begin to lose money if the price moves outside the range and stays there when weekly options expire at Friday’s close. Dealers and Market Makers will vigorously defend the boundaries or lose billions of dollars on a breakout.
Sometimes the price will exceed the boundaries intra-week. Such breakouts are acceptable to a point. But it is best to nail your profits at the boundaries. You will often be surprised to see the price return inside the range by Friday’s close. The possibility may create a trade set-up in and of itself.
But be aware that if the price exceeds either boundary significantly, Dealers and Market Makers may aggressively hedge their portfolio deltas by selling futures into the same direction of the move, potentially making the advance or decline worse.
Next, we set the daily expected move ranges for the trading day ahead.