Blog Archive

I have to admit that 66 points doesn’t seem like a lot. I really thought we would get that print on Friday. Now we will have to wait until Monday. I still think the number gets hit with sell pressure the first two times we print there. After the third time, we should rotate up, and explore the space, so to speak.

Grains look suspiciouly weak heading into the Wednesday Planting intentions numbers. Remember the funds are short wheat, long corn, and only slightly long beans. We will see some evening up of these positions going into Wednesday. Monday and Tuesday may give us […]

Well, we have absorbed what one would have thought would have been a very bearish item, the new zillion dollar health care plan. I can’t see how on a Friday, with the next unemployment number less than 2 weeks away that we don’t go get that 11,000 print in the cash Dow. We are also moving into the last day of the month, next Wed, March 31st. Also the start of a new quarter… That’s a recipe for re balancing and hopefully some volatility. Volatility equals trading opportunity. That’s why we hope for it as traders.

I am not sure we will settle above 11,000. […]

Dow Theory states that the Dow acts as a forward looking indicator. Thank you Charles Dow for being the father of something as murky and uncertain as technical analysis of markets. If Economics is the dismal science, technical analysis and the ‘random walk theory’ are a close second. Both economics and technical analysis are rife with Monday morning quarterbacking. Its just the nature of the beast. We look to read the tea leaves, and we base our anticipation of future events based on how the market has reacted in the past. Period.

Friday, March 19th, the Dow Cash got to within 181 points of […]

Ok, I haven’t written a word since our last un-enjoyment. Mostly because nothing materially has changed in my opinion.
The stock indexes are what? Climbing a wall of worry. We will still see 11,464 in the next 6 weeks, and we will see a Newsweek front page story singing the praises of Obama for riding the Dow up 5,000 points from its March 2009 lows.
Unemployment will creep at 10 percent. When I was at Colgate taking my econ 101, we were continually reminded that most economists at the time felt that 6percent unemployment was “full” employment. 94 perecnt of people who wanted work […]

After 2 1/2 years and a loss of 8 1/2 million jobs, we are happy as a lark to have an unemployment figure where we only lost 36,000 jobs. It seems that after month after month of 200 to 300K losses, what’s left of American business has fired everyone possible.
Even the largest Blizzard in years couldn’t cause any more lay offs.
Right now we have “steady” unemployment at 9.7%. Of course we are not counting the chunk of people who have just given up. That puts the figure closer to 16 or 17%.

Now we can look forward to a 35Billion dollar stimulus package. […]

The whole world is now currency trading experts, apparently. When we have politicians investigating short position speculators in the Euro, its pretty much a done deal that the move is over.

If GM is too big to fail, don’t you think that Greece, which has been around a little longer than GM, is also too big to fail? After 2000 years did you really think that Greece somehow wouldn’t pull through this? Have we all been watching too many re-runs of Mad Max?
If I see one more reporter changing his verbal diaper after discussing Greece and its woes, I am going to go […]

Back in 1980-1984 when I was in High School, I had a professor named Dr. Ben Sauers. He had his PhD in economics. Hence the Dr. In any event, I remember 2 things about him 1) he introduced me to reading the WSJ, and he liked to talk about M1 and M2. At the time that was the number the whole economic world focused on.
Money Supply. Then Paul Volker used the fed to raise rates through the roof, and finally squelch inflation.

Today, the number we all focus on is coming out on Friday of this week. Unemployment. The first Friday of every month. […]

I haven’t changed my opinion on anything in a few days, therefore, I haven’t seen the need to write.
I am looking at the chart of the S&P500. If someone handed it to me without telling me before hand what it was a chart of , or from what time period. I’d have to stay with my feeling that short term trend is still cautiously bullish. The intermediate term trend (1 year or less) is still bullish. And the longer term trend is neutral. Ditto for the Dow Jones.

I continue to feel that we will climb a wall of worry, at its best. We […]

Re-print of my Feb 2nd post.. At this point, a trade up to 82 in the DXY looks like a good call. So I am re-printing it as an indication that, yes, I actually am a pretty good technical analyst with some very profitable trading ideas. FYI, Friday the 19th had a high at 81.34 a 9-month high. More importantly, we have moved from our 18month low in December at 74.23, a 7.11 move in 2 months, pretty much an indication that the dollar is on a strengthening move now. I really like 82 as a sale the first time up, because, once again, its […]

The Discount Rate is the interest rate the Fed offers to member banks and thrifts who need to borrow money to avoid having their reserves dip below the required minimum. The higher the discount rate, the higher mortgage interest rates will be. When the discount rate goes up, the prime rate goes up as well, which slows the demand for new loans, and cools the housing market.This evening, the Fed waited until the markets were closed to raise the rate from .25 to .75

Just what we need, a cooling off of the housing market, eh?

Prime Rate is the interest rate offered by commercial […]