"FV" ~870. News: MBA purchase applications, CPI, Current account, Oil inventories, Bernanke speaks. IRs: nothing Oil futurres as of this post red and sitting right on $70. SIFs are green. If we believe in the cointegration, SIFs are going red with oil. We'll see. Gold futures have started to go sideways, and more and more it looks like an irrelevant trading instrument to me except in the most extreme cases. 900 SPX minimum support. 878 and 872 are probably the the strongest attractors short term. One has to be careful while Bernanke speaks, but it should be 98% what we have heard in the last few weeks. This mild correction has been on trivial volume, but so was much of the runup.
"FV" ~ 880. News: Jobless claims, Leading indicators, Phily Fed, Nat gas inventories, Geithner speaks. IRs: Tons of announcements, Bill settlement. Oil futures in a holding pattern at the recent high. SIFs have pulled back, with oil holding near recent high is imo a divergence. At some point oil can't all be about the dollar and fundamentals become important. When that happens remains to be seen. Gold futures sleepy. That's a euphemism for saying, irrelevant. S/R as in previous posts. 900 SPX is minor suppot. 878 and 872 are the short term attractors. The US economy is so dependent on (selling stuff to the) rest of the world at this point, that making things appear ok can often replace them being ok. Reminds me of a story. My ex is from South Africa. She told me the story that when she came to this country that everything looked so good. She told me when she first saw an apple on sale at the supermarket here, it looked like the most delicious apple she had ever seen. She bought them with anticipation. When she took a bite out of it, she was totally flattened. It was less than ordinary. She said she learned an important lesson about America on that day that has proven correct over and over again. We sell the shell and making things look good is more important than them being good. Substance is really shallow. Marketing is truth. Was it always this way?
I suppose now you are changing your mind with regards to near term fed hikes as the futures put a big rally. I read a study showing that fed futures have been wrong ever since they were allowed to trade. In easing cycles they antecipate hikes that never come and the fed rate go lower and stays there for longer than the futures think
Link to the study? Near term? I agree with FFFs, very late this year, there is a good chance of a small raise from zero. My mistake, and perhaps FFFs, is that this may be a jobless recovery, in which case we may see inflationary pressures (which is what a rising stock market could be interpreted as) without job recovery, which is closer to stagflation rather than inflation and making the FEDs decision that much harder. (US) Corporations don't have their fortunes aligned anymore with the fortunes of their home base. They have way less "skin in the game" here than they used to. Imo, we are going to see a game of who blinks first. Those that missed this rally are not being allowed in cheaply by those that courageously entered at the bottom. Those that missed the bottom aren't going to make their peers right by buying here and allowing others to sell into them and giving them a loss almost from the beginning. Remember, investing[less so trading] is a beauty contest. You have to convince someone else to drive the price in your direction once you are in it. If these people get in now, who is left without a seat when the music stops? Volumes tell this story well. Blink.
"FV" ~885. News: nothing IRs: nothing Oil futures trading higher with equities pre-market. Put up a chart of OIH: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=...on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined That screams sell to me. Pick a logical entry, like a pullback to the trendline. USO on the other hand is still bullish: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=USO#symbol=USO;range=6m Gold futures, uh, sleepy. Quadruple withing. Interesting where SPX bounced. Looks like landing SPX between 900 and 925 made the most puts and calls lose, although lots of these options are closed well before yesterday, so open interest isn't as accurate today: http://www.cboe.com/DelayedQuote/QuoteTable.aspx Type in SPX in the box, then scroll down to see the option chains. 920 to 925 is minor resistance. 930 is minor resistance. And now that 942 has been trampled over so many times, it is also minor resistance. 950, (966 ?) 972 and 1000 are strong resistance.
I figured I should post what happened to me since I opened my yap earlier: while I was nicely profitable the day after, and that day earned me most of my profits this week, it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. So much for easy setups. As you note, gold has been tightly range bound for quite some time. Sooner or later it'll break out again, in some definite direction, but for now, it's a sideways crawl. Of course, Iran is threatening to blow bigtime as I write this, so Monday might yet prove interesting. But thinking about it, you probably should just not comment on the gold market. You're right that its relevance to the stock market is tangential, at best. Its relationship is indirect, through currencies and commodities. Correlation with stocks, negative or positive, is only high in times of crisis.