Equities Start The Day Higher
Equities start the day higher as Russia and Ukraine call for a cease fire. Is this cease fire #4 or #5? Feels like it might be #5. I’ll tell you what, if this conflict is supposed to start WW3 it sure is taking its sweet time. Tom Clancy would not have approved this manuscript in its current form. Anyway, it appears to me that the market wants to climb higher and faster than Alex Honnold. Every day brings some kind of new high so I’m wondering what the downside catalyst might be? From my cheap seat the only thing that worries me is sentiment. II (the newsletter one) has 56% bulls and 13% bears. Yikes. Usually 60% bulls precedes some kind of pullback and 13% bears (go Chicago!) is the lowest reading in 20 years. AAII bulls (the retail one) is rocking a 51% reading and that’s just shy of its 3 year high. So yea, I’d expect some kind of weakness soon because everyone is a bit too bulled up.
After the open we got exactly the weakness I just mentioned. Basically a full bore selloff for the entire first half of the day. You want a link to express today’s price action? Well dear reader, here you go. In fact click that link again if you want to get a feel for how $AAPL traded. I guess when you spill every dirty celebrity picture including those of Cookie Monster doing salacious things for a chocolate chipper you’re gonna have a bad time. Apparently Samsung also released some new phones or something but I don’t know a single person who uses Android so whatever, maybe I run in the wrong circles. What else? DAL fell the most in the S&P after warning about its 3rd Quarter. DAL is one of those stocks that has been absolutely killing it and all 20 analysts on the street that cover it rate it “buy”. Always hate to see that (even though they’ve been dead right for months), consensus eventually fails in the stock market. Not a lot of interesting winners to talk about, at least for my purposes. FSLR / MNK / SPLS / XLNX / and NUE were the only names of note. I guess there was also INFI (+50%) which joined ABBV in developing and commercializing a new cancer drug. By lunch we were actually negative after opening above 2,008. Zut alors! (see mom? That 8th grade French really paid off)
We got the latest Fed Beige book in the afternoon where the wonks noted “modest economic growth” in 10 of 12 regions. Modest is better than none! We’ll take it! The market continued to trade like it was suffering from a bullish hangover and by the time the market closed we had lost all the day’s gains plus 1 more point. SPX 2000? We’re back! What’s the main takeaway from today? That too many people are bullish, the market had gotten ahead of itself, overnight gains were the great “suck-in”, and nothing goes up in a straight line. But guess what, it’s just random market movement people, nothing major occurred today.
Final score: Dow +6bps, S&P500 -8bps, Nasdaq -61bps, Rus2k -62bps.
News Highlights:
- Succinct Summation of the Day’s Events: Too many bulls, market had to shake ‘em up a bit. AAPL suffered because iCloud stinks and everyone is long the stock. US Automakers are selling a lot of cars.
- Parents of college freshman, especially one’s seeking a humanities degree, please see the following chart and get your kid to take App writing 101 followed by Computer Geeks get richer than anyone else 101.
- Is the stock market cheap? Love this link, lots of good data to pour over.
- A book written by a successful short seller? Sign me up.
- You know how they say “there’s no bad pizza”? that “even bad pizza is good” ? I found one that looks like it sucks.
- How great would canoeing here be?
- I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry for noodles.
- Nice article on how difficult Bull markets can be (look at those charts…look how long the rallies can go..)
- This article is so insane I had to put it in the recap. The author basically concludes that having two children is financial suicide (based on college tuition costs). Check this quote out “If the sticker shock of a 2030s education does not make you think twice about having more than one child – it should”. Wait…my second child is supposed to start college in 2027. Oh the humanity.
We’ll end tonight with what must be the most pointless waste of time since I tried out World of Warcraft for those 4 years. Unless I’m viewing this wrong these people are…juggle fighting?
http://youtu.be/yAzS7j1cf1Q?t=43s
Have a good night.