Testy Tuesday - Have the Markets Become Comfortably Numb?
by Phil - January 19th, 2010 8:08 am
"There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying.
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown,
The dream is gone.
but I have become comfortably numb." - Pink Floyd
I have a theory that the markets (and the American people in general) aren’t irrational, they are simply shell-shocked after suffering a very traumatic group financial experience…
To be shell-shocked is to be "mentally confused, upset, or exhausted as a result of excessive stress" and the most common symptoms are: Fatigue, slower reaction times, indecision, disconnection from one’s surroundings, and inability to prioritize - That certainly sounds like our Congress doesn’t it? Combat stress disorder was first diagnosed in WWI, when 10% of the troops were killed and 56% wounded - far worse than had been experienced in previous wars. Our current financial crisis has similarly affected more people than any previous crisis with almost everyone knowing someone who is bankrupt or lost their jobs or homes and almost no one escaped the carnage of the downturn without some financial damage.
Combat fatigue may go a long way to explaining the severe drop-off in volume that has plagued the markets since March, with participation now down to 25% of where we were last January and that leaves us open to the blatant sort of market manipulation that Karl Denninger caught last week as well as the usual nonsense we get daily from HFT programs that drive the market with such precision that we are able to tell how the day is going to go by simply checking our hourly volume targets. Here’s a clip from CNBC where a floor trader discusses market manipulation as a fact of trading (2 mins in).
As Nicholas Santiago points out on In The Money Stocks, "January is usually a very high volume month, yet it has started off the New Year even lighter than the last two months of 2009. Light volume markets are very difficult to short. Hence the old saying, ‘never short a dull market’." Not only is the market volume light, but over 60% of the trading volume is concentrated on 5 stocks: AIG, C, BAC, FNM and FRE!
We have often noted that high-volume (relatively) days almost always tend to be down days and PSW Members can tell you how the…
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Frothy Friday - Churn Baby Churn!
by Phil - October 23rd, 2009 8:26 am
What a wild week we are having!
We dumped our shorts as planned yesterday morning, getting a very nice dip at the open and my 9:36 Alert to Members was even titled "Take Those Short Profits!" and our upside targets were set (as they were in the morning post) at: Dow 10,087, S&P 1,096, Nasdaq 2,173, NYSE 7,204 and Russell 623. Where did we finish? Dow 1,081, S&P 1,092, Nasdaq 2,165, NYSE 7,182 and Russell 613 - so a bit short of all of our targets but not bad considering we were opening 167 points below that on the Dow so perhaps I can be forgiven for a 6-point miss…
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Even our free PSW Report readers would have done great just following the trades we had in last week’s Wrap-Up (Report subscribers get to read our articles without the 48-hour delay). We had GS Nov $210s shorted at .87, now .35 (up 60%), CERN short $85 calls at $4.15, now $3.10 (up 25%), ISRG Apr puts and calls sold for $39.20, now $36 (up 8%), PARD at $6.87, now $7.35 (up 7%), NTRI at $18.60, now $19.15 (up 3%)…
We had other trades that are still in progress. ICE notably burned us so far, but we rolled them up and shorted them some more yesterday (now $106.56). We’ve had a wild mix of short and long trades this week as we TRY to get more bullish on the markets but yesterday’s run-up had us reloading Thursday’s successful short plays as that set made 20% or more across the board in less than a day. Note…
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Which Way Wednesday - The Beige Book Boogie
by Phil - October 21st, 2009 8:14 am
The last Beige Book report was on September 9th.
At the time the Dow was looking toppy at 9,650 and we had poor consumer confidence numbers (just like yesterday) and poor consumer credit number (no change) and the book had very little "good" news to report (see my analysis) - Yet the market broke over 9,600 again that day and then took off all the way to 9,900 a week later. At the time, we were looking for any excuse to go higher on the hopes that this earnings period will look like last one but have we now come too far, too fast?
It seems we are finally hitting the point of diminishing returns for earnings. Expectations have finally gotten so high that even big beats aren’t enough to keep the momentum going.
Last earnings Q, we were down from 8,900 in June to 8,100 on July 9th as companies began reporting and we had a nice, 1,000-point relief rally over the first two weeks of earnings. This time, we went up an additional 500 points in the past two weeks, over our 9,600 line and that has been in anticipation of a repeat of last earnings but the circumstances are very different this time and it takes a lot to justify a 20% run off the July lows.
Keep in mind that, looking at the sector charts, Energy, Materials and Tech are leading us. Since semiconductors are simply another form of commodity - this is almost entirely a commodity rally in the midst of a recession with Consumer Staples, Financials, Health Care, Industrials, Telcom, Utilities and Transports all underperforming the rest of the S&P. As I keep saying - if no one is shipping anything, how the hell can we be having a proper recovery?
The Beige book is an anecdotal view of the economy gathered roughly through the middle of October and we’ve seen no improvement in Jobs since the Sept 9th report, Cash for Clunkers ground to a halt and, just this morning, we got a horrific 13.7% decrease in the number of mortgage applications from the previous week. That number includes "seasonal adjustments," without adjustments, morgage apps plunged 22.4% despite record low rates as government assistance begins to peter out. The Refinance Index, also adjusted for the holiday, decreased 16.8 percent from the previous week and the seasonally adjusted Purchase Index decreased 7.6 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 16.7 percent compared with the…
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Thrilling Thursday Morning - Beijing Bop
by Phil - September 3rd, 2009 8:28 am
That is, of course, what residents of Macau are required to chant every morning in honor of Stanley Ho, who held the monopoly on casinos in China until 1992. This morning it turns out Macau’s economy contracted by 13.7% in Q2, it’s 3rd consecutive quarter of shrinkage. It’s possible that the restrictions placed on civil servants in 2008 to stop them from gambling and to curb money laundering has caused much of the decline why is the decline accelerating if things are so good in China? One thing about Macau is that all the US businesses that are now there make it harder for the Chinese government to pad the statistics and, taken at face value, Maccau is underperfoming the rest of China by 22%.
This is worth noting today as China is leading the market bounce as the vice chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, said the authorities will promote a “stable and healthy” market, tempering investor concern that the government wants to curb equity and property speculation. Ministers from the Group of 20 nations are likely to suggest the global economy is healing when they meet in London this weekend, while the European Central Bank probably will keep interest rates at a record low today. The Shangai composite index ran right up to the 5% rule today and has pulled a turnaround in global equities. As noted in David Fry’s chart, we were oversold and due for a little bounce anyway.
As noted by Ben over in our Chart School section, copper has climbed back into the "stupid zone" on that news but still has a ways to go before getting stupid enough to short again. We’ll be keeping an eye on the copper miners like PCU, FCX and RTP as well as BHP, who got a nice pop on a UBS upgrade this morning but it’s a little early to short until we see jobs reports today and tomorrow.
This is not surprising to us as we read the Fed minutes yesterday and the greenest shoot they could find was that things were picking up in other countries, a favorite ploy we discussed in Monday’s post as the Shanghai was falling 6.7% that day. Fortunately, we were playing bullish into the close as we know how this game works and I had said to members just ahead of the Fed, at 1:58: "Beware bears - I was just noticing that last minutes were May 20th…
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Weekly Wrap Up
by Phil - April 5th, 2009 7:32 pm
Another week, another 5% gain - isn’t the stock market easy?
We’ve gained 1,400 points in 4 weeks from our March 9th low of 6,600 - pretty impressive on the whole - but we have suffered a serious decrease in upward momentum since March 23rd, when we finished at 7,775. That’s 1,175 points in 10 sessions followed by just 225 over the next 9. It’s a little hard to reconcile this very toppy sort of action with the "bull market" mania that has swept the media this past week. We’ve been bracing ourselves for a slap of cold water all week that never really came although this weekend the WSJ ran this nasty unemployment graph along with an article titled: "Time to Brace for Trouple as Profits Debacle Starts" which reminds us why we went into the weekend 55% bearish.
In last weekend’s post I warned: "Don’t forget I was looking for something like a 5% pullback and "all" we got was 2.5% so far" and it only took minutes out of the gate on Monday morning to give us the rest of that 5%. I reposted our target levels on Monday morning of Dow 7,636, S&P 805, Nas 1,525, NYSE 5,075 and Russell 420, which were well tested Monday and Tuesday until we got a proper breakout on Wednesday morning.
I was actually more optimistic on Monday than I am today as Monday our plan was we were hoping to hold our pullback levels and form a base we could build off. The problem was the way we did rally made no sense - we didn’t climb a wall of worry - we climbed a wall of ACTUAL bad news that gave us brand new reasons to worry. While the difference may sound subtle - it’s actually a big deal! As a UBS economist I quoted in Monday’s post said: "he housing market isn’t about to start booming, but the intensity of the pain will probably recede." This is the result of our abusive relationship with the markets as they declined over 50% in 6 months - the mere absence of pain is treated as pleasure.
We had 4 new trade ideas from the Weekend Reading post in HIG, ING, FXE and BLK with all but HIG solidly performing already. As with most of our stock entries, we have been hedging with puts and calls sold against to insulate us from another downturn - just in case… Monday we got…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
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