Before the Open (Apr 20)

Posted on by Jason Leavitt

Good morning. Happy Wednesday.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed up across the board. Most of the indexes rallied at least 1%; Taiwan and Seoul rallied over 2%. Europe is posting solid gains. Every market is up at least 1%. Futures here in the States are up huge. If these levels hold today’s open will be at a 6-day high…easily recapturing the losses following S&P’s shift from stable to negative regarding the US credit rating.
The reason for the big gains is earnings. INTC had a great report and is being rewared with a 6% jump.
Without a dominant short term trend I’ve been laying low lately. I’ve done a few short term trades, but haven’t entered any swing trades the last several days. I like to trade good patterns from good groups under the right conditions. That way there’s a nice wind at my back, and since the market hasn’t been offering such a situation, I’ve been doing a lot more watching than trading lately. For this I have no regrets. Over the last couple weeks the S&P lost about 40 points and as of today’s open will have recovered more than half. The overall trend remains up (I’ve never abandoned this stance) while the near term trend was in question.
Now we’re going to get a big gap up which is nice for the bulls and a huge headache for the bears. I’d be surprised if the market ran hard after gappping up…especially with overhead resistance and the bulk of earnings season still in front of us. I’m still playing it conservative and am building my list of stocks to play should the near term uptrend resume. More after the open.
(also, I’ve posted numerous set ups on the message board this morning)
headlines at Yahoo Finance
today’s upgrades/downgrades
this week’s Economic Numbers

0 thoughts on “Before the Open (Apr 20)”

  1. Thanks. It whistful Wednesday
    No signs of why all the excitement
    except maybe more liquidity than
    insight. INTC and IBM were a schock to
    the techs – maybe export. But Crude is
    up and the dollar down big. My PMs
    plowed on thru the night. This is
    not healthy for anyone. Coming down
    the other side should be interesting.

  2. Two likely scenarios are possible today: 1)We start to roll over
    around mid-day once the European markets close; 2) V bottoms are
    easy to identify, and since April has been a sloppy month so far
    this could be one of those days where the bull market gets
    back on track. In the pre-market I bought GS and INTC. HW

  3. The CNBC news reporter I was talking about yesterday is Melissa Francis.
    She moved in next door to me. Should I go over there later on today,
    knock on her door, and borrow a cup of sugar? Yummy! HW

  5. The problem with breaking and entering into Melissa’s Condo
    is that she has the biggest door man I’ve ever seen on the
    upper east side of Manhattan. Looks like a retired football
    player if you ask me///Bought GS and INTC in the premarket,
    but they are not holding up well right now. So I got the
    hell out with a $400 dollar profit. I am more inclined to
    believe that we might have a sell off late in the day today.

  6. island tops,marginal new tops, lower double tops,lower high tops,exhaustion tops and spinning tops
    now if that doesnt top all ,we could have some zero bottoms
    doesnt matter to myself,there will always be a up and down for me to trade –intraday

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