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How easy it is to look like a complete goose when you permit key numbers to be calculated by a robot.
This afternoon (French time) I was revising a script that calculates average volume for each of the stock Indices; in checking the results I noticed that they didn't correspond with what appeared in todays' OzRant.
And that, Dearest Reader, is because when today's numbers were generated, there was a director which had been chmod-ed to 044 by accident (by me) instead of 644/
the upshot of this, is that the algorithm that does some of the calculations, used numbers from July 11th.
{Thanks also to the e-mail correspondent who identified the cockup.}.
Since the Rant is generated by a mechanism which uses different data tables for different indices, it turns out that the only stuffup was in the AD and ADVol numbers for the market as a whole; everything else was fine.
To be frank, I ought to have thouyght harder about adding some 'IAH' (Idiot At Helm) checking; for example, the declining volume in XSO can not logically be larger than the declining volume for the whole market... anything that say otherwise ought to be put in the bucket marked "Numbskull".
I have now introduced precisely such a check, and henceforth the production of the RantScreed will throw out an error if $TotVol[XSO]>$TotVol[ALL].
Now - to correct the record...
Total volume traded on the ASX was 1.5 billion units, 15% below its 10-day average. The ASX's daily listing of all stocks included 1439 different 3-letter FPO's which traded (i.e., had non-zero trade volume). Of these, 365 issues rose, with volume in rising issues totalling 359.7 million units. Conversely (or even contrariwise), 789 stocks were dragged below the Plimsoll line, with aggregate volume traded of 958.1 million shares.
Now, with all that being considered, it does not change the analysis one iota - today satisfied a Rant criterion for a short term bounce (but not one of any real magnitude or duration).
For those of you who like a punt and who have a futures account, buy the SPI right about now (or buy Nasdaq futures, which will react more powerfully) - European indices have been taken down by offshore markets, and I will bet dollars to donuts that the US will charge higher (perhaps after some early weakness, but the odds are that it will run hard right out of the gate).
