Insights

For once, there was not much excitement in stocks today, which is fine by most folks. Bonds were up again today as was gold and food. Our stock market is having a hard time getting above 1200 on the S&P 500 but it is not dropping, either. The meeting between Angela...

Futures have stocks opening about 0.5% higher. That may not last. Europe is down -0.5%, Asia is mixed, the S&P is right around a resistance area at 1200 and volume on this rally has been weak. There is strong resistance at 1240-1260, about 3%-5% higher. More people...

Industrial production +0.9% to 77.5 Housing starts -1.5% Import prices +0.3% The main reason for the increase in industrial production were the bounce back in auto production after a big slowdown from part shortages related to the Japanese disaster. Mining was up 1%....

It was a risk-on day for investors as stocks, corporate and emerging market bonds, commodities, precious metals all were nicely higher. The only decliners were US Treasury bonds (only slightly) and the US dollar (down 0.5%). The volatility indicator, still pretty...

After 4 days of the Dow moving up or down >400 pts today looks pretty tame. Stocks are up about 0.5% but has not moved around much today. France banned short selling of banks for the next 2 weeks and European markets responded very favorably, up 2%-3%. In the US the...

After retesting the lows yesterday, the market was sharply higher today. Several times on the blog this week I have written about a bottom in the market decline and a retest of that level. The bottom, at least short-term was apparently Monday and successfully retested...

I wrote yesterday that generally when a high volume, high fear day seems to indicate that a selling climax has occurred the market will then go higher and in 2-4 days revisit that low. This is called a retest of the low and one must wait a day or so to see if the...

Federal Reserve Statement 110809 (Click for text) Note especially the first paragraph which describes current economic conditions. Also note the the Fed says that: 1. Downside risks to the economic outlook have increased 2. They anticipate keeping interest rates...

Stocks were up 4% - 7% today, depending on the index. Gold was also higher, as were bonds. Often, but not always such rallies last 1-3 days and then come back down to "test" the previous low. We bought a replacement for some of what was recently sold this morning when...

Was yesterday a selling climax? Stocks are up 1.7%-2.6%, depending on the index. Before our markets opened European markets turned up sharply from lower levels to finish mixed. Gold is down, which one would expect. In the last few minutes that rally has cooled...