{"id":5402,"date":"2012-03-01T08:31:19","date_gmt":"2012-03-01T13:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leavittbrothers.com\/blog\/?p=5402"},"modified":"2012-03-01T08:31:19","modified_gmt":"2012-03-01T13:31:19","slug":"before-the-open-mar-1-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/?p=5402","title":{"rendered":"Before the Open (Mar 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning. Happy Thursday.<\/span>
\nThe Asian\/Pacific markets closed mostly down. South Korea rallied 1.3%; Australia, Hong Kong and India moved down about 1%. Europe is currently mostly up. France, Germany and London are up about 0.8%. Futures here in the States point towards a moderate gap up open for the cash market.<\/span>
\nThe dollar is flat. Oil and copper are up. Gold and silver are up about 1%.<\/span>
\nThe market felt weak yesterday, but the closing numbers weren’t too bad. The small caps dropped about 1%. Most other indexes dropped about 0.5%. Volume did expand, but in the grand scheme of things, it was just an innocent down day within a solid uptrend.<\/span>
\nIn the near term, it’s becoming more worrisome the small caps are lagging. Here’s a chart that compares the SPX and RUT.<\/span>
\n\"\"
\nThe market has had many reasons to drop the last month, but so far it has completely ignored all of them. Opening gap downs have gotten bought. Intraday dips have gotten bought. Worse-than-expected earnings and econ news have been ignored. Bears who’ve continuously tried picking a top or hesitant bulls who haven’t been able to pull the trigger have felt some sort of pain. Playing the best stocks from the best groups has worked well. The trend will end one of these days, but there’s no sense guessing when that will be. Having said this, the market is not very correlated. That means you can’t rely on an up-trending market to rescue you from losing positions. On any given day the market is flat, there’ll be many stocks up 2-3% or down 2-3%. This is a good thing; it makes trading easier because the winners can more easily stand out, but it also means you have to manage your positions wisely. 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