Swing Trading Strategies & Stock Picks Since 2003

The good news is S&P 860 which was the first of our 3 levels held at least today. Can you trust it? Nothing can be trusted nowadays.
The bad news is another day of incredible volatility where nothing made sense. We keep saying the volatility is unprecedented but it just keeps getting wilder. Today we moved in a >16% range.
9:45 - 11:00 AM (1.25 hours) +4%
11:00 AM - 3:00 PM (4 hours) -6.5%
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM (1 hour) +5.8%
I can only assume everyone is positioned for 3 PM hedge fund selloffs and when it doesn't happen you have a massive short covering. 3 PM has been the hour of power.

Honestly every day this week (until today) since we were 1/3rd cash we'd done about 2/3rds of what the market did. When the market was up 3% Monday, we were up 2%. When the market was down 6% Wednesday, we were down 4%. Today our week was obliterated. Whatever happened today was a complete disaster as we got whipsawed left and right with only about 4 holdings on the long side that were positive; so we were completely out of sorts with the market. 15 names (almost half the stocks we own) lost 7% or more. So it was a "good" day for the market but a completely perplexing and thoroughly frustrating day on this end. One of many.
This is one of those days you punch up the NAV of your mutual fund at 6:00 PM and ask what idiotic moves this stupid fund manager did today to lose 4% on a +1% day in the market. Answer: I owned stocks. Non commodity/global growth stocks - that got smashed left and right. Today the grim reaper came for health care, pawn shops, solar stocks, et al. 5 "safe" healthcare stocks lost between 7 and 18%. If it's not one thing it's another.