{"id":5119,"date":"2011-12-09T08:31:50","date_gmt":"2011-12-09T13:31:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leavittbrothers.com\/blog\/?p=5119"},"modified":"2011-12-09T08:31:50","modified_gmt":"2011-12-09T13:31:50","slug":"before-the-open-dec-9-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/?p=5119","title":{"rendered":"Before the Open (Dec 9)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning. Happy Friday.<\/span>
\nThe Asian\/Pacific markets closed down across the board. Hong Kong lost 2.7%; Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan dropped more than 1%. Europe is currently mixed. Germany and France are up; Austria and Belgium are down. Futures here in the States point towards a positive open for the cash market.
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\nThe 17 euro countries plus 6 others have agreed to a new treaty that requires stricter budget rules and oversight of national budgets. An agreement on fiscal discipline is necessary before the ECB, IMF and others would commit to help countries that have huge debt and unsustainable borrowing costs. This is the news. The response in Europe was lukewarm, and justifiably so. They already have a treaty that dictates financial risk, but all countries ignored it. Oh well, we’ll see what happens. They’re meeting again to work out what exactly the treaty will contain and how violations of the budget rules will be dealt with. The goal is to have the treaty written by March.<\/span>
\nThe reaction by the futures market in the US has been positive. Coming up with some sort of agreement is better than nothing. The euro moved up slightly; the dollar down. Gold and silver are up as is oil and copper. <\/span>
\nA lot of damage was done to the charts yesterday. In most cases the indexes closed at a 6-day low. That’s what happens when the market trades quietly for several days – it only takes on bad one to wipe everything out. Any stocks that were consolidating with the market dropped out of their little flag patterns. Any stocks that were already lagging got hit hard. And stocks that had recently broken out are mostly back into their ranges. Perhaps it was a little nervousness ahead of the European summit. If so the market should right itself soon. I’ll give it one more weakish day to shake the tree and scare the weak hands. Then it needs to move up. Here’s the 30-min S&P chart. Other than a brief move down and then back up in late November, the S&P has traded between 1200 and 1280 for two months…and there have been many large gaps. Today’s open will be very close to 1240 – the middle of the range. From a technical standpoint you can’t be overly bullish or bearish. From a news standpoint, it’s nice to get some uncertainty from Europe out of the way. More after the open.<\/span>
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\nheadlines at Yahoo Finance<\/a><\/span>
\nheadlines at MarketWatch<\/a><\/span>
\ntoday’s upgrades\/downgrades<\/a><\/span>
\nthis week’s Earnings<\/a><\/span>
\nthis week’s Economic Numbers<\/a><\/span>
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