Employment is picking up at banks anyway.
Monday, February 8, 2010. 9:15 am.
The major banks are beginning to hire again, not in their banking and lending operations, but in their brokerage and investment arms.
Bank of America announced last week it will be hiring 2,000 new stock-brokers at its Merrill Lynch division. The bank said it will not get involved in trying to hire experienced but highly paid brokers from competitors. It will be hiring 2,000 broker trainees.
Deutsche Bank announced over the weekend that it will aggressively expand its equity market business in Asia, part of its plans to expand its key European business units globally. Deutsche Bank is one of Europe’s most active banks in foreign exchange and derivatives trading. The bank’s CEO did not specify hiring numbers, saying it “will acquire the talent we need in must–win areas”
Ah, yes, the lessons have been learned this time. We won’t have to worry any more about the previous problems of banks being too big to fail, and involved in so many facets of the financial system that the failure of one could lead to the failure of many, and collapse of the global financial system.
Asian markets were mostly down again last night.
But the moves were smaller than over recent days and weeks, and some markets closed up for the session.
The DJ Asia-Pacific Index closed down 0.6%.
Among individual countries:
Australia closed up 0.1%. China closed down 0.1%. Hong Kong closed down 0.6%. India closed up 0.1%. Indonesia closed down 1.7%. Japan closed down 1.0%. Singapore closed up 0.4%. South Korea closed down 0.9%. Taiwan closed up 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.
Markets this morning.
European markets are mixed but up on average of about 0.3%.
Oil is up fractionally, $.15 a barrel at 71.34 at the moment.
Gold is down $1 an ounce at $1,065 at the moment.
Markets in the U.S.
This week there will be very few potential market-moving economic reports. 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.
And the 4th quarter earnings reporting period will be winding down.
That will leave the market trading primarily on its new worries of potential debt crisis in global economies, in various government owned sovereign wealth funds, emerging markets, the time table for removing stimulus efforts, economic growth for the rest of the year, etc. That should be enough fodder to create continued up and down volatility.
Our pre-open indicators this morning are fractionally negative, pointing to the Dow being down 10 points or so in the early going, meaningless as to direction for the day.
Stock Market Patterns.
The next weekly pattern is that this is the week before this month’s options expirations week, and the week before tends to be negative. However, with the market so short-term oversold that is in question. (see chart of the morning from Saturday’s post)
Interesting Charts of the Morning.
The strength in commodities on expectation of continuing economic recovery has gone away at least temporarily.
The short-term 21-day moving averages have, as usual, continued to be as important on the downside as they previously were on the upside, now overhead resistance on rally attempts, as they were previously support on pullbacks.
Oversold short-term enough to produce at least another rally back up to the m.a.?
Please scroll down to see other recent ‘Interesting Charts of the Morning’ and commentary.
To read my weekend newspaper column ‘Can Corrections Be Better Than Rallies?’ click here!
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