If you are confident in your stock picking skills, then sure, one can always stick with trading individual equities vs. the indices.

I had addressed that in what I think might have been that last video I did on Thursday where I begin to shift away from hand-picking (trading) a lot of individual stocks, long & short, to focusing more on trading the indices, including the $VIX, as I expect a broad-based sell-off (once the 200’s on QQQ which are being tested now) clearly get taken out.

During those panic sell-offs that will (somewhat under the 200’s take out a dense floor of stops (that I see in my mind’s eye), with selling begetting more selling, including margin-call induced selling, I like to zero in my focus to the indices & just leave the existing individual stock positions in place with OCO orders.

In slow, boring, sideways markets like we’ve had for many months now, individual stock picking shines, but during strong market corrections & crashes, I can maneuver & pivot focusing on just a few index futures (/NQ, /RTY & /VIX usually & right now) as even the intraday swings within the bigger (days & weeks) trend can be extremely profitable to side-step or capitalize on by reversing (covering shorts & going long for the likely & quick counter-trend bounces).

I’m asking because before the war, the charts were showing trouble brewing in the market. Eventually there will be a break though in the war, we’ll have a big relief rally, and the underlying problems in the market haven’t changed at all, but the charts might burn through the divergences.

S&P futures are down about 2% as of 10:51pm est (which is right on the 200MA on daily chart). A ceasefire could easily move the market 6% in a day, which would probably end the divergent low on the daily chart of the S&P.

Is it better to avoid the indexes now and focus on individual stocks?