{"id":5344,"date":"2012-02-13T08:38:42","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T13:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leavittbrothers.com\/blog\/?p=5344"},"modified":"2012-02-13T08:38:42","modified_gmt":"2012-02-13T13:38:42","slug":"before-the-open-feb-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/?p=5344","title":{"rendered":"Before the Open (Feb 13)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning. Happy Monday. Hope you had a nice weekend.<\/span>
\nThe Asian\/Pacific markets closed mostly up, but only Indonesia (up 1.3%) moved more than 1%. Europe is currently up across the board. Austria, Belgium, Germany, Amsterdam, Stockholm and London are up more than 1%. Futures here in the States point towards a solid gap up for the cash market which will fill Friday’s gap down.<\/span>
\nThe dollar is down. Oil and copper are up. Gold and silver are up.<\/span>
\nI don’t have anything new to add to the comments I made over the weekend in the Index Report and video<\/a>. The market dropped on Friday because of hangups with the Greece bailout, and today futures are up because Greece agreed to strict financial reforms and therefore will receive bailout money. Purely from a technical standpoint, the market needs to rest, but there seems to be an invisible hand at work that won’t let it. Every opening gap down gets bought. Every intraday dip gets bought. Overbought has remained overbought for several weeks. But new indicators are popping up. We never know what’s going to happen, but we can assess the situation by examining the quality of the set ups we’re working with, the risk\/reward ratios, and the degree of success of recent trades to determine if we should throw all caution to the wind and trade aggrssively of if we should abopt a defensive posture. The latter is the current case. Perhaps the market holds on for a few more days (thanks to Greece) or maybe it’ll hold up into options expiration this Friday. I don’t know. Nobody does. But I do know, from a technical standpoint, things are less favorable today than they were a couple weeks ago. I’m long, but I’m playing it safe. That means smaller position sizes, and I’m quicker to take partial profits. More after the open.<\/span>
\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>
\n