do you take notice of "the Market"?

I swing trade and have heard and read a thousand times that the "market" moves stocks 80% of the time.
My question is.
Do you take much notice of what the "market" is doing before you enter trades.
For instance, if the S&P is on or near resistance (like now - early April 08) do you wait and see what it does before taking any directional trades or do you say "stuff it" and do whatever you want and predominantly take any setups that look promising. Of course some sectors will (generally) ignore the broader market (gold oil etc).
looking forward to your replies.
Ash

OzAsh said:

Do you take much notice of what the "market" is doing before you enter trades.

Click to expand...

Hi Ash,
Welcome to T2W!
I day trade U.S. equities and I always note A) what the market is doing and B) the correlation of my stock to it. If you join the Technical Trader forum run by Grey 1, they have turned this into something of a fine art, going long or short individual stocks based largely on whether indicators suggest $INDU index is overbought or oversold. I don't go quite this far, largely because I'm hopeless at codes and techie stuff! However, I always have a chart of QQQQ open to compare Nasdaq stocks or SPY for NYSE ones. If the stock is highly correlated I will, on occasions, take the signal to enter or exit a trade from the index, rather than from the stock itself. I don't use traditional indicators much - other than a couple of MA's - but I do rely heavily on the index charts. I suppose one could argue that these are another type of indicator. Certainly, I'd be lost without them!
Tim.