Charts
Interesting action with the VIX yesterday, break out to the 52 weeks low and then rebound to the upside. Looks someone was buying insurance after the run yesterday.
Global Macro Perspectives
Interesting action with the VIX yesterday, break out to the 52 weeks low and then rebound to the upside. Looks someone was buying insurance after the run yesterday.
Noting much on the news front today. Mr. Bernanke speech yesterday stirred up the markets sending U.S. dollar up, and treasuries down. The rhetoric is unchanged, the highlight is that the FED is ready to tighten the monetary policy when the economy starts to recover. Bloomberg link: Bernanke Ready to Tighten When Recovery Sufficient.
Looks like market optimism is not jet ready to vane. On the back of falling dollar the gold reached new highs, and equity followed. It looks that the speculation on extension of some stimulus measures played most important part in this mini rally. Looks like dollar, gold, crude oil and equity correlation have become a part of computer algorithms and almost perfect inverse relationship will continue. Not indefinitely, I’m sure. It looks artificial.
The market just keeps on going on, you could think that it could go on even further. I would not be particularity surprised to see S&P 500 at 1200. We have equities rallying and at the same time declining US dollar and gold hitting nominally highest level ever.
The S&P 500 hit the new high for the year yesterday, but it didn’t sparked interest from the mainstream media. The market looks as it is looking for clues in which direction to move. Its similar like in June/July, everything was pointing to move lower but all went in the other direction on “better than expected” earnings. Earnings season is months away and I’m feeling tempted to start a short position.
The short term top I wrote about in earlier posts evolved to nothing more than just a dip buying opportunity and it looks like we are going to stay range bound unless we have some surprise news. The economic data from the last week was boring, nothing interesting even a bit, and nothing that would change my views. Only piece of data that occupied my mind (for few second at least) was unemployment report. Non farm payrolls for August came at -216k vs -230k consensus and -276k in July (as usual revised downwards from -247k). Unemployment rate hit 9.7% vs. 9.5% consensus. Obviously the pace of job losses has slowed down, but with such high unemployment the recovery is not just around the corner. Off course, media can find optimism in the worst piece of data. According to Bloomberg this is positive for company earnings. Yeah, sure…. Bloomberg link: U.S. Recovery Leaving Workers Jobless May Spur Company Profits
The market has come down slightly in last few days. Again, major theme was health of world banking sector.
Despite better than consensus data on US housing suggesting recovery in housing prices and better than consensus consumer confidence the market failed to rally.
We have had some spectacular runs from the recent lows both in the equity arena and among commodities. As I am writing this introductory post markets are hitting new highs for the year. Common to these diverse markets is that we have seen little or no material improvement in underlying fundamentals only consolidation at initially depressed levels.