Before the Open (Mar 4)

Good morning. Happy Monday. Hope you had a nice weekend.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mostly down. China dropped 3.7%; Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, New Zealand and Taiwan dropped more than 1%. Europe is currently down across the board. Greece is down 2.4%; no other index is down 1%. Futures here in the States point towards a down open for the cash market.

The dollar is flat. Oil and copper are down. Gold and silver are up slightly.
The big news overnight was the beating China took – mostly due to its real estate index dropped almost 10%. You’ve heard about the ghost cities in China – massive areas that are capable of housing millions of people – that are almost completely empty. The Chinese government wants to make sure prices don’t run up, so they’re doing what they can to keep a cap on things. Will this affect the US? Not directly. They make our stuff, and if their housing market crashes, they’ll still make our stuff. But a housing crash in China could negatively affect other countries (Australia for example) which will then ripple over to the US.
The conclusion from my weekly report posted over the weekend and the video posted on the blog was the following:
1) Near term, day to day, anything goes. On any given day the market could trend up or trend down for no reason at all regardless of all other factors. This is great for day trading but a nightmare for swing trading.
2) On an intermediate term basis, over the next several weeks or upwards of a couple months, my bias is to the downside. The selling intensity on down days is stronger than the buying intensity on up days, volatility is expanding and several breadth indicators suggest less and less stocks are participating in the market’s new highs. Something has to give. Either we see across-the-board improvement or prices will need to come down. But this doesn’t mean crash, it just means we need a correction that allows the market to cycle down and re-set itself.
3) Long term, the trend is solidly up, and as of now, I expect 2013 to be a good year.
If my indicators are telling, we’ll get weakness over the next month or two followed by some chopping and churning followed by a rally that closes the market up nicely on the year. We’ll see. This is what my indicators are telling me, so I reserve the right to change my mind if the indicators change. 🙂 More after the open.
headlines at Yahoo Finance
headlines at MarketWatch
today’s upgrades/downgrades
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers