{"id":9504,"date":"2016-02-29T08:43:20","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T13:43:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leavittbrothers.com\/blog\/?p=9504"},"modified":"2016-02-29T08:43:20","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T13:43:20","slug":"before-the-open-feb-29-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/?p=9504","title":{"rendered":"Before the Open (Feb 29)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning. Happy Monday. Happy Leap Day. Hope you had a good weekend. <\/span>
\n The Asian\/Pacific markets closed mixed. China fell 2.9%; Japan and Hong Kong dropped more than 1%. Singapore and Indonesia led to the upside, but there were no 1% winners. Europe is mixed and quiet. London, Russia and Greece are up more than 1%; Germany and the Czech Republic are down more than 1%. Futures here in the States point towards a slight down open for the cash market. <\/span>
\nLeavitt Brothers Weekly<\/a><\/strong><\/span>
\nThe dollar is up. Oil is up, copper down. Gold and silver are up. Bonds are flat. <\/span>
\n The market did well last week. Not fantastic, not pretty well. Across-the-board gains were recorded, but the indexes closed off their intraweek highs. <\/span>
\n Several breadth indicators surged to levels not seen in months. Here’s the 10-day MA of the AD line as an example. It exceeded its October high. This means over the last 10 days, advancers have beaten decliners by a bigger margin than any other 10-day period going back to last summer. Unlike downward spikes, that often pinpoint bottoms, high prints signal strength and high odds the strength continues. Even if a top is inevitable, it’ll take a few weeks to form, so our short term up bias remains in place. <\/span>
\n\"\"
\n The S&P closed right at an inflection point – 1950 is both a key resistance level and the 50% retracement of the January sell-off. This creates somewhat of a “line in the sand” level\/time. The bulls will want to see the market accelerate through this area. Otherwise they’ll lose patience in fear of prices backing off. <\/span>
\n\"\"
\n I’m maintaining my up bias in the near term, but longer term I still don’t like what I see. With the indexes trading below their down-sloping 10-month moving averages and the “wrong groups” leading, I’m not confident a sustained rally is in the works. More after the open. <\/span>
\nStock headlines<\/strong> from barchart.com…<\/span>
\n Morgan Stanley (MS +2.15%) and Goldman Sachs (GS +1.35%) are both down at least 1% in pre-market trading.<\/span>
\n Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX -4.79%) slumped 7% in pre-market trading after the company withdrew its financial forecast and delayed releasing its quarterly results as its CEO returns from leave.<\/span>
\n Federal-Mogul Holdings (FDML +12.93%) may be active today after Carl Icahn, the company’s biggest shareholder, offered to buy the rest of the company for $7 a share, well above Friday’s closing price of $4.98.<\/span>
\n General Motors (GM +0.44%) was downgraded to ‘Hold’ from ‘Buy at Argus Research.<\/span>
\n Dillard’s (DDS +3.73%) was downgraded to ‘Sell’ from ‘Hold’ at Deutsche Bank.<\/span>
\n Southwestern Energy (SWN -5.76%) was downgraded to ‘Underperform’ from ‘Market Perform’ at Raymond James.<\/span>
\n Dynegy (DYN +3.06%) was upgraded to ‘Buy’ from ‘Neutral’ at Guggenheim with a price target of $22.<\/span>
\n FormFactor (FORM +1.64%) said it sees Q1 revenue of $65 million-$70 million, below consensus of $70.3 million.<\/span>
\n Cleco (CNL -1.03%) reported Q4 operating EPS of 38 cents, below consensus of 42 cents.<\/span>
\n New Jersey Resources (NJR -2.58%) will replace StanCorp in the S&P MidCap 400 as of the close of trading on Monday, March 7.<\/span>
\n Business Insider reports that Bank of America (BAC +3.08%) is preparing for “significant” job cuts of over 5% across its global investment banking and markets business.<\/span>
\n Atlas Resource Partners LP (ARP -5.63%) was downgraded to ‘Sell’ from ‘Hold’ at Stifel.<\/span>
\nEarnings and Economic Numbers<\/strong> from seekingalpha.com…<\/span>
\n Today’s Economic Calendar
\n 9:45 Chicago PMI
\n 10:00 Pending Home Sales
\n 10:30 Dallas Fed Manufacturing Survey
\n 3:00 Farm Prices<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
\nToday’s Earnings here<\/a><\/span>
\nOther<\/strong>…<\/span>
\ntoday’s upgrades\/downgrades<\/a> from briefing.com<\/span>
\nthis week’s Earnings<\/a><\/span>
\nthis week’s Economic Numbers<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Good morning. Happy Monday. Happy Leap Day. Hope you had a good weekend. The Asian\/Pacific markets closed mixed. China fell 2.9%; Japan and Hong Kong dropped more than 1%. Singapore and Indonesia led to the upside, but there were no 1% winners. Europe is mixed and quiet. London, Russia and Greece are up more than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9504"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}