Rickshaw Market in all its glory...Best bet is to stay awake for the European open...ES can move 5-10 handles in 30 minutes, then the algo's just slow it down during US hours.
I usually can put a position on around 8pm CST and have it closed out with a decent gain or stopped out by 2:30am or so. Doesn't take long to get it moving once the euro opens
Summer time blues, nothing but chop and slop. FXC seems to know how the over night game is played. Some nights we get a flush down, then rally back up by NY cash open. Some of the best moves during the summer come on thin overnight moves, then chop and slop for the US session.
It's not the complete overnight, that is an overstatement...There is that small window from 3am-4am (ET) where things are gamed regularly...If anything the recent trend has been a spike higher during this time period followed by a slow drift back down for the NY open (then a very robotic climb higher during the AM (followed by alot of "slop and chop")...This market has found every way conceivable to make it back to 2100+...
Whats your take on this, all this money flowing out of equities yet up we go...must be the magic futures....so many gaps in SPY.
I hear ya Rickshaw...I had read something like 2 months unabated outflows and yet here we are...I also read the same things pretty regularly from 2009 onward (and it made a great deal of sense to me in a ZIRP environment)....since joe retail is of retirement age and can't get yield, he/she is liquidating equity investments for living expenses... It's not that much different than all of the volume on down days and the market makes all-time high's on fractional volume...Believe me not easy to wrap my head around alot of this stuff after 20 years being around the markets...Many patterns are new to me, but in some respects I saw alot of the 2003-07 type stuff during the past 7 years...Yield chasing, no alternatives to equities in a low to no rate environment, etc, etc... Look at this stuff lately...Volatility doubles as soon as there is any downside range, which means that you are just as likely to see a 20+ point bounce in ES off the lows as a 20+ point downside move...Hence, the market conditions all participants to be scale down buyers or to essentially not short the markets...That pullback starting around 4/20 at 2105 saw multiple 30-40+pt ES rallies to the 2075-80 area...hence there was never an easy hold to shorting it...
To me nothing makes since anymore, the central banks have hijacked our markets, it would not surprise me one bit if they were in there buying certain leadership stocks with heavy index weightings. I know they buy index futures. What a perfect tool float the index futures up overnight hold them up till US cash opens, exchange floor specialists markup there merchandise everything gaps up on the open it's like a free markup in price based on what the index futures do.
The consortium of CB's schedule those meetings throughout the month and then the markets are in a "holding pattern" awaiting "further instructions"...If not chopping around waiting for Yellen, Draghi or Abe, there is the OpEx (the big one) that has become the ultimate squeeze machine and then there is the EOM/EOQ stuff that is always lurking around the corner... It seems just as plausible that occasionally the bid sitting is lifted and we get a Jan-Feb episode where markets actually resemble something I used to remember...Of course who can forget last Aug 24th when the markets did a "one day correction" after sitting in that absurd range for 3-6 months prior...The distortions are mind boggling.
How many times has the world Bank lowered growth forecasts in the last 2 years????? Here we are again getting yet another lowered forecast from the big world Bank but just don't worry, this will mean new highs on the S$P by July....kick back and collect your free money!!! WASHINGTON (AP) -- The World Bank is reducing its forecast for the global economy this year — again. The aid agency predicted Tuesday that the world economy will expand 2.4 percent this year, down from the 2.9 percent it expected in January and unchanged from a tepid 2015. "The global economy is fragile," said World Bank economist Ayhan Kose, who helped produce the forecast. "Growth is weak." In the years since the world began recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have repeatedly proved too optimistic about the world economy and have had to downgrade their previous forecasts. The World Bank's latest 2016 forecast is more pessimistic than the IMF's outlook for 3.2 percent global growth this year, a projection made in April. Since then, it's become clearer that low commodity prices continue to vex many developing countries whose economies depend on exports of those commodities. And advanced economies are still struggling to gain momentum as they contend with aging workforces and lackluster productivity growth. The World Bank expects the U.S. economy to grow 1.9 percent this year, down from 2.4 percent in 2015. The downgrade for the United States reflects a weak first quarter: Growth from January through March reached a negligible 0.8 percent annual rate. U.S. manufacturers have been especially hurt by a strong dollar, which has made their goods more expensive overseas. The bank expects developing and emerging market economies as a group to grow 3.5 percent this year, down from the 4.1 percent it forecast in January and barely changed from last year's 3.4 percent. World Bank economists are drawing a distinction between emerging market countries that export commodities and those that import them. The exporters, crushed by tumbling prices of oil and other commodities, collectively grew just 0.2 percent last year and are expected to expand 0.4 percent in 2016. The importers, which benefit from lower raw materials prices, are still growing at healthy rates — 5.9 percent last year and a predicted 5.8 percent this year. Latin America has been particularly hard hit. The World Bank predicts that the region's economy will shrink 1.3 percent this year after sliding 0.7 percent in 2015. Brazil, mired in political scandal, is expected to suffer a 4 percent economic contraction in 2016 after shrinking 3.8 percent last year. The 19 countries that use the euro — the eurozone — will grow 1.6 percent, the same as last year, the World Bank says. Eurozone growth has been constrained by the weakness of European banks, which are still saddled with bad debt and aren't making many new loans. Japan will expand 0.5 percent, a bit slower than last year, the World Bank predicts. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's aggressive plans to rejuvenate growth — partly through the Bank of Japan's easy-money policies — have had only mixed results so far. The World Bank left its forecast for China's economic growth unchanged at 6.7 percent. The Chinese economy, the world's second-biggest, has been decelerating for six years as Beijing has sought to move away from dependence on investment in factories and real estate toward slower but steadier growth built on consumer spending.