U.S. equities felt strong selling pressure in pre-market trading Friday due to expected yet unfortunate economic data. Markets were unable to build optimism throughout the day Friday as the overbought tech rally ran out of gas and all indexes ended the day down; DJIA -1.87%, S&P 500 -2.03%, NASDAQ -2.63%. Consumer spending for February came
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Crude began to rally early Thursday as U.S. commodity markets opened on positive news that 2008 Q4 GDP numbers were not as terrible as expected. Futures prices are completely ignoring the stockpiles of crude throughout developed countries, in the Arab world, and floating off-shore in tankers. While WTI crude futures were trading below $45/barrel they were
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Bulls found evidence to further their exposure to U.S. equities on Monday as markets climbed to post the largest daily increase of the new year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) gained nearly 500 points and the S&P 500 soared 7%. The surfacing of a tangible Treasury plan to create the promised "public/private investment program"
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After profiting from a trade, humility can be a lucrative virtue… Regardless of how often one tracks the health of the stock market during these turbulent times, it would be impossible to ignore the fury of the recent rally in U.S. equity markets. Many have called for this rally to be the first leg of
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Growth in U.S. equity markets over the past two weeks has been fueled by new found confidence in the banking sector as XLf, the Financial Select Sector SPDR, as it has driven higher by 52% at the close on Thursday. The decline in bank stocks over the past two days has caused the Dow 30
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Up until this point the Oil story has been somewhat perplexing. Investors couldn't get a handle on whether the WTI crude futures were trading too expensively in the high 40 dollar range because (1) U.S. dollar strength has been keeping the commodity cheap, (2) demand seems to have bottomed but the fundamentals of the economy
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There are several similarities between the way that the S&P 500 bottomed in 2002 and how the index has performed over the past 5 months. Studying the chart of the S&P 500 during the 2002 bottom, pay particular attention to the way that the S&P 500 tested the 50 day moving average (DMA) after the
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