Before the Open (Feb 13)

Posted on by Jason Leavitt

Good morning. Happy Monday. Hope you had a nice weekend.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mostly up, but only Indonesia (up 1.3%) moved more than 1%. Europe is currently up across the board. Austria, Belgium, Germany, Amsterdam, Stockholm and London are up more than 1%. Futures here in the States point towards a solid gap up for the cash market which will fill Friday’s gap down.
The dollar is down. Oil and copper are up. Gold and silver are up.
I don’t have anything new to add to the comments I made over the weekend in the Index Report and video. The market dropped on Friday because of hangups with the Greece bailout, and today futures are up because Greece agreed to strict financial reforms and therefore will receive bailout money. Purely from a technical standpoint, the market needs to rest, but there seems to be an invisible hand at work that won’t let it. Every opening gap down gets bought. Every intraday dip gets bought. Overbought has remained overbought for several weeks. But new indicators are popping up. We never know what’s going to happen, but we can assess the situation by examining the quality of the set ups we’re working with, the risk/reward ratios, and the degree of success of recent trades to determine if we should throw all caution to the wind and trade aggrssively of if we should abopt a defensive posture. The latter is the current case. Perhaps the market holds on for a few more days (thanks to Greece) or maybe it’ll hold up into options expiration this Friday. I don’t know. Nobody does. But I do know, from a technical standpoint, things are less favorable today than they were a couple weeks ago. I’m long, but I’m playing it safe. That means smaller position sizes, and I’m quicker to take partial profits. More after the open.
headlines at Yahoo Finance
headlines at MarketWatch
today’s upgrades/downgrades
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers

0 thoughts on “Before the Open (Feb 13)”

          1. Indeed, but dead money for us dumb money.
            Lots of other great plays. I think the ultra long ETFs may be done but there are still alpha stocks, new and old. Need to be selective.

          2. This all said I think it would be prudent to monitor the so called ‘good’ banks like wfc jpm and esp the cdn banks (which supposedly were not involved in the bleep up eveyones portfolio front running) like td bns ry bmo. but i still think they will end up as dead money in the long run.
            we shall see.

    1. So, what will tell you it is ready to move up beyond say $6.75? I’ve seen this pattern many times before – resulting in me bleeding to death from a thousand cuts. And, you say a reverse split is in it’s future. My experience with reverse splits has never been positive. The incentive the company has to split is either to conform to exchange rules and/or making the stock appear more attractive to investors – a marketing ploy. I’d be more inclined to short it with the momentum it already has. You can confirm you are ‘with the trend’ if holding it long enough puts you in the money.

      1. this is a worth watching item. ung is the etf for nat gas. there some industry changes coming that could result in upside pressure in nat gas.
        that is why i closed by positions in in FTK a few days back. FTK is extensively involved in fracing.
        there are more patterns than the std ewards & magee and, worse, the same rehash on the web.
        but do your own dd.

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