Before the Open (Apr 29)

Good morning. Happy Friday.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mixed and with a bearish bias. Australia lost more than 1%; Japan gained more than 1%. They were the only big movers. Europe is currently mixed with no standout winners or losers. Futures here in the States point towards a positive open for the cash market.

The S&P has moved up 9 of 11 days. Many participants believed a top was in place, yet here we are at the highest level in almost 3 years. Not bad. I know the movement doesn’t always make sense, but this is exactly the way we want it. If the market followed a perfectly logical “make sense” path, then everyone would play and no one would make any money. Stocks would gap to a certain level and sit there until the next piece of information came out. Then they’d gap again. Instead of being frustrated, relish it, love it. Love the fact that the movement doesn’t always make sense and people disagree because this is what creates opportunity.
It’s Friday. It’s been a long week for me, so I don’t plan on doing much. If it was Mon or Tues, I’d be working overtime trying to catch up, but being Friday, I’m tempting to start from scratch this weekend rather than try to catch up on everything I missed. So much stuff happens (and it’s impossible to follow everything) that you can actually ignore a week’s worth of “stuff” and move forward. As a chartist this is easy because I just assume everything is “in” the charts, and therefore I don’t have to catch up on the why.
Have a good day. I’ll be around today but not extremely active.
headlines at Yahoo Finance
today’s upgrades/downgrades
this week’s Economic Numbers