Monday’s Mixed Signals – Time to Dress the Windows?
by phil - September 29th, 2014 8:27 am
Wheeee, what a ride!
We're up, we're down and over and out – but That's Life in the markets, right? Life is being good to our Short-Term Portfolio, now up 59.2% for the year as we caught the bearish move very nicely. Because our STP was up, we have, so far, been able to ride out our long-term positions but we're certainly concerned about a major breakdown possibly in the works.
As noted by Dave Fry in his SPY chart, that 50 dma is a big point of contention now and of course we're going to get a bounce off a line like that. In fact, the new lows we hit at the end of the week led us to recalculate our bounce lines for this week and now we are looking for:
- Dow - 17,000 (weak) and 17,100 (strong)
- S&P 1,975 (weak) and 1,985 (strong)
- Nasdaq 4,475 (weak) and 4,500 (strong)
- NYSE 10,760 (weak) and 10,820 (strong)
- Russell 1,125 (weak) and 1,140 (strong)
We weren't too convinced by Friday's low-volume rally and we aren't going to be convinced by anything that happens on the last two days of the month (window dressing) but clearly any failure of those weak bounce lines is going to have us racing back to some bearish bets into the start of October (and earnings season).
Speaking of earnings - the CEO of Macy's, Terry Lundren is not too enthusiastic about Q4. After…
Monday Market Mark-Up – 50 Ways to Dump the Dollar
by phil - November 9th, 2009 8:18 am
"The problem is all inside your head", G20 said to me
The economy's an easy fix if you don't want to wait
All we need to do is globally inflate
There must be fifty ways to dump the dollarG20 said it's really not our habit to deflate
Furthermore, we have elections and the voters hate to wait
So we'll indebt ourselves, buy lowering the rates
There must be fifty ways to dump the dollar
Fifty ways to dump the dollarYou just buy a few Yen, Wen
Push up the Pound, Brown
You buy up the troy, boys
Give Goldman the fees
Take the IMF bling, Singh
Let it drop like a rock, Barack
Act like you're bored Jean-Claude
Let the dollar fall free
I heard they were dancing to this one at the G20 Meeting so I thought I'd share it with you. Never have so many gathered so often to accomplish so little as our G20 in the past 18 months. This weekend's meeting of the World's "top" Finance Ministers resulted in a split on whether to tax financial trading as part of a broader strategy to ensure the global economy’s expansion is less crisis-prone. The idea of the levy was to prevent excessive risk-taking and fund future bank rescues but US Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner said trying to get the banks to behave is "not something we’re prepared to support."
That was all the Gang of 12 needed to hear and the commodity markets went wild with the guarantee of no additional regulation on the horizon and the dollar was taken down to new lows in overnight trading, plunging to $1.50 to the Euro and $1.685 to the Pound, over 2% off Friday's lows. They Yen Rose back to under 90 to the Dollar and the Nikkei, of course, did not like that one bit and an early rally turned into a flatline for the day. The rest of the global markets, however, were off to the races with Europe up 1.5% at 8 am and the US futures up over a point as well as gold flies to $1,110 an ounce and oil heads back to $78.50, up $2 from Friday's low.
Of course, doing nothing to prevent excessive speculation by the "too big to fail" crowd isn't…