It seems that a lot of traders were stunned that the market crashed last week. I was on the sidelines, overwhelmed with a work project and missed most of the events–didn’t even know that the market went down 1,000 points Thursday, until my son called mid-day and asked if I was buying anything (I did buy some QLD, fortunately). As Alex has said repeatedly,”the market speaks, it is up to us to listen.” So, I went back to my charts to see if the market did speak last week, and why weren’t more traders listening? Of course, like always, greed or fear had clouded reason and vision. This time it was greed, people kept buying the highs, the Greater Fool theory at its worst. In hindsight, last week’s top and market reversal was very clear, and those who misplayed it, or didn’t play at all (me), missed a very profitable opportunity. The weekly SPY chart shows a classic MACD-H bearish divergence, something Alex has been writing and talking about since Trading for a Living. The daily chart shows another MACD-H bearish divergence, this time on a short-term MACD-H. We also had a 1,2,3 Higher Top that was screaming at us. To make matters worse, we had one of the oldest trading tools in market history, a moving average cross-over yelling that bad stuff was imminent. So, this top/reversal was definitely Old School, and pretty basic, and I shiver over how many articles I’ve read about indicator divergences not working, or why moving average crossovers never did. Like Voltaire, I need to tend my own garden, and my garden is old school technical tools.