Full question: As your trading was influenced by Gil Morales, what is your take on the undercut & rally set up and why are you not using it often in real time.
Well, first of all Gil didn’t use the Undercut & Rally (#URS) a lot back when I was a member of his service half a decade ago. I don’t know what he is doing now but I recall that he just started to focus a lot more on swing trading with the help of Richard Wyckoff’s techniques back then. He also had a novel U-turn pattern where he simply bought into bear flags as they oftentimes resolved to the upside in the QE environment.
Anyway, the undercut and rally setup is basically what Wyckoff described as either a terminal shakeout or normal shakeout. The low volume retest is also a Wyckoff setup which I use occasionally. It’s similar to the undercut and rally but without actually undercutting the lows. That being said I don’t use the U&R setup much because it doesn’t fit well into how I handle and navigate the opportunity cycle.
Each setup has a purpose and is most suitable in a specific phase of that cycle. Being aware of this is important in order to increase your overall win-rate.
The Undercut & Rally would come into play during market corrections mostly on the day of the broad capitulation selling climax (See Put/Call ratio for clues). However during that phase I am typically short a couple big stocks and will realize profits in those names. I sometimes do buy into one or two undercut & rally setups but it depends on how heavy I am playing the short side. It is simply too easy to mess up when switching from short to long and vice versa too quickly. I’d rather focus on re-shorting weak rallies (another one of Gil’s and O’Neil’s techniques) and monitor speculative stocks for Quiet & Tight Setups (#QTS) or similar bullish clues.
The undercut and rally setup is a bottom fishing technique after all and my desire to avoid buying stocks which did not repair their chart via bullish volume clues yet, is a major part of my proven protection plan.