Before the Open (Jul 9)

Good morning. Happy Monday. Hope you had a good weekend.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed down. China dropped more than 2%; Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea more than 1%. Europe is currenly almost entirely down, but there are no big losers. Futures here in the States point towards a gap down open for the cash market.

The dollar is down. Oil and copper are up. Gold is flat; silver up slightly.
I don’t have much to add to my weekend report. The market has been stair-stepping up the last five weeks…2 steps forward, 1 step back. Most indicators are in good shape, but there are some divergences I don’t like, divergences which tell us at the very least a give back is in order. Whether that give back lasts a few days or a week or longer isn’t apparent. In any case there are warnings signs.
Earnings season kicks off this week with AA reporting after today’s close. GOOG reports Thursday and JPM and WFC report Friday.
Wellpoint (WLP) is buying Amerigroup (AGP) for $4.9B.
Spanish 10-year yields are back above 7%.
Overall there are lots of negative opinions out this weekend. Among them, Nouriel Roubini says a perfect storm is lining up that will be worse than 2008. “A collapse of the eurozone, a U.S. double dip, a hard landing in China, a hard landing in emerging markets, and war in the middle east…next year we could see a global perfect storm,” he warned.
I guess we’ll see. Good thing we don’t have to be good at predicting such things to make money trading. Regardless of what’s going on in the world, if the trend is up, we go long. Simple as that. We aren’t reckless. We don’t go all in or on margin. We play the best stocks from the best groups and be in the habit of taking profits along the way to reduce risk and free up cash for other trades. Economists are either 1) always right but their timing is way off and therefore their opinions are useless or 2) they’re just flat out wrong so often they should be ignored. Roubini has been very bearish for a very long time, but there have been periods where the market trended up for months at a time while he was super bearish. In time he’ll probably be right but not until anyone who listens to him gets wiped out.
Be defensive here. More after the open.
headlines at Yahoo Finance
headlines at MarketWatch
today’s upgrades/downgrades
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers