Before the Open (Mar 19)

Good morning. Happy Monday. Hope you had a nice weekend.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mixed…India (down 1.2%) was the only 1% mover. Europe is currently mostly down…there are no 1% movers. Futures here in the States point towards a flat-to-down open for the cash market.
The dollar is flat. Oil and copper are up slightly. Gold and silver are down.
Most of the indexes broke out in a big way last week. The Russell remains sitting just below resistance.
Many of the breadth indicators I follow, which had been moving down as the indexes moved up, are now moving up. So it appears the market corrected with time, not price.
The market has had many opportunities to drop, but it hasn’t. It has climbed the proverbial wall of worry. One by one the bears have had no choice but to abandon their stance and either go long and at the very least head to the sidelines and stop trying to pick tops. With so many indicators now pointing up, it would be very fitting if the Russell broke out, and then the entire market corrected. I’m not predicting this, but this is how Wall St. works. When the last of the bears finally throws in the towel, that’s when we’ll get a price correction.
For now I’m long and only interested in the long side. But with the market being much less correclated the last couple months compared to last year, we have to manage each position wisely. In a correlated market, when the indexes slowly move up, almost all stocks will do the same. In a non-correlated market, when the indexes slowly move up, many stocks will rally much more and many stocks will pull back. Because of this you can’t cite the movement of the indexes as a reason to stay in lagging positions.
The market could have sold off after the employment data. It did. Then it could have sold off after the FOMC. It didn’t. Now it has a chance to sell off after options expiration. We’ll see what happens. More after the open.
headlines at Yahoo Finance
headlines at MarketWatch
today’s upgrades/downgrades
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers