Asian markets were up nicely this morning partly on news that Chinese manufacturing was basically flat, which is an improvement. European markets followed suit but gave back a good bit of their gains. There were actually a couple of European economic reports that were better than expected.
In the US, housing #s were poor, as was the Richmond Fed branch report on their region. Still, stocks are up over 2% so far. We’ll see if that picks up steam or fizzles out.
Gold is off 1.6% after setting a new record overseas while you were sleeping. Gold is very overbought and could use a 10-15% drop before continuing higher. It could be that some hedge funds selling gold are putting the $ into stocks.