People are extremely reluctant to admit their mistakes - and that is still very, very cautious.

People downright hate having to correct their assessment.

At least in the experiment under laboratory conditions, one or the other seems to have been willing to accept the death of a fellow human being rather than allow insight into one's own imperfections.

Analysts like me should do something a little easier with that.

Otherwise my guild would quickly depopulate the world: after all, mistakes are a completely inevitable part of our work.

Anyone who cannot admit it is out of place.

In addition, from praying for health, reinterpreting, bending over and “forgetting” his false prognoses, sooner or later he will acquire veritable roof damage.

I myself therefore made it my business early on not to make a big deal out of misjudgments, but to simply admit them.

Anything else would be dishonest anyway, and I certainly don't want to do the consequences to myself.

A new all time high

At this point I would have been only too happy to admit a very special misjudgment and seek apology. But really "unfortunately": Nothing will come of it. My doubts about the suitability of our national team and its head coach, expressed in April, were correct. Apart from one or the other little bright spot and many large speech bubbles, there wasn't much. My football heart is bleeding. The analyst cheers - and carries on.

A central event of the past few months took place just a few days ago: The Nasdaq Composite Index achieved a new all-time high under insane technical framework conditions and therefore contrary to my expectations. In normal trading hours, that alone would be worth a headline. New best values ​​- a look at the Dax in the past decades shows that impressively - are not something that can be expected every day. But because times are anything but normal, a new high - emotionally - has lost a little of its charm. After all, we have already seen a great many of them in many markets in 2021. Nonetheless, this new high of the Nasdaq Composite is analytically something special: The US high-tech index thus closed a consolidation between around 12,600 and 14, which has been going on almost since the beginning of the year.100 points.

So investors have long fought and wondered whether they are really ready to buy the market past its previous highs, and for many months decided against it. The rise in returns, the subsidence of the pandemic, and perhaps also the lack of semiconductors, provided them with good reasons for this reluctance for a long time. If the market participants were ready to buy the market to new heights, it was very likely that it did not happen “just like that”, but after careful consideration and with the greatest possible degree of conviction. And that's really good.

The technical analysis rules now provide for a clearly rising chart.

The following rule of thumb can be applied to the search for a price target: Find the distance between the high and the low of the completed consolidation and apply this value to the breakout level.

The average expected gains should therefore be around 1500 points, and a target would be around 15,600 points.

A trend is more likely to continue than to reverse

But there is also a downer: one can often draw conclusions about the state of the bull market from the nature of a consolidation. Without wanting to go into more detail here: In the present case, the patterns of sideways movement since the beginning of the year suggest that the breakout of 14,100 points heralded the last part of the upward trend since the Corona lows in March 2020. But even this coin has two sides: This last part of a bull market often does not follow any rules and, for example, overshoots any possible targets.

Unrestrained euphoria and the sure “knowledge” that it has never been so easy to make money on the stock market are making their way into the party and turning the party into a lavish party - but they are also paving the way for the hangover afterwards. So 15,600 points need not have been the last word. More important than ever in this phase is a stop loss, in my case an analytical one: If the Nasdaq Composite already falls below around 13,700 points, explicitly contrary to expectations, it is likely to have created a problem that is only partially manageable.