Before the Open (Apr 12)

Posted on by Jason Leavitt

Good morning. Happy Friday.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mostly down. India and South Korea dropped more than 1%; China. Malaysia, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan also dropped noticeably. Europe is currently mostly down. Austria, France and Germany are down 1% or more. Futures here in the States point towards a moderate gap down open for the cash market.

The dollar is up. Oil and copper are down. Gold and silver are down.
JP Morgan (JPM) is down 39 cents and Wells Fargo (WFC) is down 43 cents after releasing earnings.
So what’s going on here?
The market has been up all week. In fact it’s been best week since the first week of the year.
Except for the small caps, all the indexes are at all-time highs or multi-year highs.
Many of the internals, which had lagged, have turned up.
There’s no question the trend is up. The bulls have been winning the fight for the better part of the last four years. I don’t know when it’ll end, and I don’t really care. I’ll leave the guessing games for smarter people. I’ll stick to my simple analysis which has always kept me on the right side of the market.
On the flip side, many former leading stocks are lagging. AAPL is an obvious one. GOOG has started to pull back. MSFT and INTC got hit hard yesterday. CAT and FCX are also lagging. Is it just a case of money rotating from one group to the next? Perhaps. I don’t care about AAPL – people can buy the products of other companies. GOOG recently made an all-time high, so I’m not overly concerned there either. MSFT and INTC are suffering because the PC industry is suffering – no surprise there either. Consumers are buying tablets and smart phones instead. CAT and FCX are a problem.
The reality is you can slice and dice the market any way you want, and the end result will be the same. The trend is up and is super strong, and it would be utterly foolish for anyone but skilled short term traders to go short. That’s the bottom line.
Given this, the S&P is 50 points off its low from last Friday, so chasing breakouts at this point comes with added risk. The same pattern in two different market stages will yield two different sets of results.
Be long or be on the sidelines. There is nothing else to do. 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 (Apr 12)”

  2. its just a different valid trading plan
    as a daytrader i have to pick the tops and bottoms usually more than once intraday
    but also know thy market and who the buyers /sellers are
    the last 3 days dead cat was japan buying everything–bonds etfs ,equities of europe /usa/australia etc–they announced they finished that y/day
    its a world market ,run by the central banks and the in the know insto bigboy banks

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