Before the Open (Apr 17)

Good morning. Happy Tuesday.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed with a bearish bias. Taiwan dropped 1.9% and China dropped 1%; India rallied 1.2%. Europe is up across the board. Austria is up 2.2%, and Belgium, France, Germany, Amsterdam and Stockholm are up more than 1%. Futures here in the States point towards a moderate gap up open for the cash market.

The dollar is flat. Oil is up, copper down. Gold is flat, silver up.
The indexes were all over the place yesterday. The Dow led, and the small caps were right behind. But thanks to AAPL and GOOG, the Nas and Nas 100 suffered a moderate loss.
Coming into this week there were very few good long set ups to play and a decent number of good shorts.
Many breadth indicators had dropped enough to support a bounce but had not dropped to “washout” levels yet.
Yesterday’s put & call open-interest data revealed a need for the market to move up the next couple days if it’s going to cause max pain.
The market seems to be in a topping process, but we’ve seen this enough times the last couple years that we can’t go all-in on the short side. Here’s the 60-min S&P chart. A long support trendline was broken, and now a rising wedge is forming. A measured move takes the index down to 1330, but I’m still eyeing 1340 as a target per the daily chart I posted yesterday.

My bias is to the downside, but I’m still playing this defensively. Even though there are very few, if any, good long set ups, the bulls deserve the benefit of the doubt because the trend has been up for most of the last three years. More after the open.
headlines at Yahoo Finance
headlines at MarketWatch
today’s upgrades/downgrades
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers