Before the Open (Aug 27)

Good morning. Happy Thursday.
The Asian/Pacific closed mixed with a downward bias. Europe is currently mixed with a bearish slant. Futures here in the States are flat.
It’s been a fairly uneventful week so far. All 3 days saw early strength get sold into, and the closes weren’t much different than the opens. So much for letting some air out after last week’s options expiration run up. The market has been dead since than. …
The Dow has rallied 7 consecutive days – very rare.
The S&P is up 2 for the week and 40 for the month. Here’s the SPX monthly. Baring a big sell-off the next 3 days, it’ll be the 6th straight up month. Volume was strong the first 3 months but tapered off since. As I’ve stated a few times the last several months, I’m not sure volume matters as much as it used to. I used to consider Wall St. a big voting booth. More volume meant more traders in favor of a move. But nowadays, so much volume is generated from computers trading back and forth with each other, we don’t know what is real buying and selling and what is computer trading (does anyone know a source that can separate the two?). Citigroup has 5.5 billion outstanding shares. The stock trades 900 million per day, so every 6 days the entire float changes hands. There’s no way that volume is real legit volume – it’s just computers day trading back and forth with each other. Anyways, volume in my opinion isn’t as important as it used to be.

Here’s the 7-day, 10-min chart. Other than the opening minutes last Friday, we’ve had 4 days of range-bound trading. Dips get bought; rallies get sold. Don’t overanalyze the situation.

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