From brother Surf: "Oh man-- what a terrible way to start the year. We miscalculated the international pressure on the US indexes for now" This is exactly what the FED and other officials will say if indexes continue to slide - it's because of China, nothing wrong with US economy!
Now the chance of a rate hike has been pushed out to June Whats the fed to do now if China slows....uh ohhhhhhh China is the world. They slow and the rest of the world goes into a deeeeep deeeep recession.
Now everyone seems to thing getting long is the answer...if you get long just buy a little bit. Once the mentality shifts of where you thought you can buy the markets every time it dips 3-5% and make money to where it dips 3-5% and dips another 3-5% yea that's when you will wake up and realize this isn't the same market from the last 6-7 years....
oil is close to ending its downtrend if it can hold the mid channel here, and i believe the absolute bottom has been made L 33.33 SL 33.1
Odds and ends: Ivy Portfolio had a rare short term loss with the sell signal for the S&P500 at the close of December. Oddly, it also had a sell signal for govt bonds too. China has said they're suspending the circuit breakers - this could very interesting, like retarded kids with sparklers running around a dynamite factory interesting. Iran has something like 50 some odd million barrels of oil stored on ships. I doubt they dump it all at once but if they did, it'd be fucking hillarious. And given Saudi Arabia has cut the price of crude it sells to Europe, this is another interesting area to keep an eye on. Sorry no retarded kids analogy, they all died in the dynamite factory. If you've listened to Marc Faber in the past, he's mentioned that North Korea doesn't have the technology to build a bicycle yet has nuclear capability. I wonder if their H bomb test was ordered by China to divert attention away from what's really going on in Big Red. If you want to make a case for a recessiom, check out inventory builds; this could be the reason behind some of the soft data. From Mebane Faber via NDR_Rearch: Stocks as a % of household assets : 37% second highest ever 1968 35% 1982 15% 2000 40% 2007 36% 2009 21%
just based on that, risk to the downside $2 risk to the upside $5-7, more if a geopolitical event comes out of nowhere shorting here is suicide imo the largest short positions in crude's history will make for a hell of a short covering rally