More uncertainty for the stock market.
Thursday, February 4, 2010. 9:15 am.
The market is getting the strong 4th quarter earnings it was hoping for, but hasn’t been able to rally in response. In fact the heaviest selling has come in the stocks of companies that have been reporting the best positive earnings surprises.
The jobs picture is mixed. A better ADP jobs report yesterday than expected, but an unexpected jump in unemployment claims last week has stock futures down this morning.
The Investors Intelligence sentiment index is at an extreme of bullishness usually seen near market tops. But the equally predictive poll of its members by the American Association of Individual Investors last night showed only 29.2% bullish, and 43.1% bearish, far from the more than 55% bullish usually seen at market tops.
How to sort it all out, given that we expect a serious correction sometime in 2010, and then a typical huge rally off that low in the 2ns year of this Presidential cycle?
As long-time subscribers know, we don’t think you can determine when either is beginning by analyzing the surrounding conditions and all the opposing opinions of what they mean. We believe the best, if not only way is to pay attention to the intermediate to longer-term technical indicators, and their buy and sell signals.
Yesterday in the U.S. Market.
A low volatility, sideways, going nowhere day. The Dow traded in a narrow 75 point range between its low and high all day, with the market closing mostly down.
Yesterday’s intraday chart:
The Dow closed down 26 points, or 0.3%. The S&P 500 closed down 0.5%. The NYSE Composite closed down 0.8%. The Nasdaq closed up 0.1%. The Russell 2000 closed down 0.6%. The DJ Transportation Avg. closed down 1.3%.
Asian markets closed down last night.
Among individual countries:
Australia closed down 0.6%. China closed down 0.3%. Hong Kong closed down 1.8%. India closed down 1.6%. Indonesia closed down 0.4%. Japan closed down 0.5%. Singapore closed down 0.7%. South Korea closed down 0.1%. Taiwan closed down 0.1%.
If you’d like to see a three-month chart of any or all of the above indexes click here, and then click on any of the markets in the similar list at the left side of the page it takes you to.
SUBSCRIBERS: There is an important mid-week in-depth Markets Signals and Recommendations update on your website from yesterday, and there will be a similar in-depth Gold, Bonds, Dollar, Inflation report on your website today.
Markets this morning.
European markets are down sharply this morning, on average of more than 1%.
Oil is down $.92 a barrel at 76.06 at the moment.
Gold is down $7 an ounce at $1,104, but still up $23 for the week so far.
The U.S. Dollar is up.
Markets in the U.S.
This week’s fairly heavy schedule of potential market-moving economic reports continues.
The schedule ends tomorrow with what we always refer to as The Big One!, the Labor Department’s monthly Employment Report, this one for January. We call it the big one because it has the record for most often coming in with a surprise in one direction or the other that sends the Dow in a one to three-day triple-digit move in one direction or the other.
To see the full schedule of the week’s reports click here, and look at the left side of the page it takes you to.
Yesterday’s economic report, the ADP Jobs Report, was an encouraging report, that only 22,000 jobs were lost in the private sector in January.
But this morning’s report of new unemployment claims, was a negative, that new claims rose by 8,000 to 480,000, the highest level since mid-December, considerably worse than forecasts that claims would fall 455,000.
Already negative pre-open indicators turned more negative in response to the report, and raise concerns about tomorrow morning’s big jobs report from the Labor Department.
Our pre-open indicators this morning are now quite negative, pointing to the Dow being down 70 points or so in the early going.
Stock Market Patterns.
The ‘monthly strength period’ was due to begin last Thursday, and to end today. The next weekly pattern is that next week is the week before this month’s options expirations week, and the week before tends to be negative.
Interesting Charts of the Morning.
I’m sorry but I don’t have time to provide interesting charts of the day this morning. Too much to do for subscribers.
Please scroll down to recent ‘Interesting Charts of the Morning’ and commentary.
SUBSCRIBERS: There is an important mid-week in-depth Markets Signals and Recommendations update on your website from yesterday, and there will be a similar in-depth Gold, Bonds, Dollar, Inflation report on your website today.
To read my newspaper column from last weekend ‘Is This as Good As It’s Going to Get?’ click here!
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