Last week started out with a nice impulsive looking sell-off which held the promise of a decent bear trend. However, by Wednesday it became obvious that not a whole lot had changed with respect to market activity in recent months - i.e. lots of overlapping, choppy moves without evidence of strong conviction from either bulls or bears. Translation: still in a trading range.
The best count apparent in the ES for the weeks action is that of a double zig-zag into a low on Thursday PM which marked a short term change in trend:
So where do things stand as far as the two alternates on deck from last weeks update? On the near term bullish alternate, the count would be a couple of waves 1 & 2 nests with a wave 3 commencing at Thursday's low:
Daily chart:
The more bearish alternate has a significant top in place at Monday morning's high with the corrective pattern for the week labeled as an "A" wave of a developing flat, triangle or some sort of complex corrective sequence. The chart below projects a flat.
The correction in this alternate would be Major W4 of the bull market off the October, 2011 low:
As can be seen, Major W2 (blue) was a zig-zag, so the EW rule of alternation suggests other types of corrective sequences as mentioned earlier. Also, Major W2 lasted about a month which would suggest a similar duration for Major W4.