Market comments for Aug. 12th. Initial Claims disappoint!

Initial Jobless Claims for the week came in at 484,000. This was again in the wrong direction for a recovery. Last week Initial Jobless Claims came in at 479,000 while only 460,000 were expected that week. This week they were expecting only 465,000 Initial Jobless Claims. And 3 weeks ago the Initial Jobless Claims came in at 457,000 so you can see the trend of Increasing Claims.

The Futures market dropped on most Indexes as the Dow is now at -70. This is not encouraging for those Long the market. It doesn't look like a snapback from yesterday's lows is imminent.

Tomorrow the CPI and Core CPI data will be released for July as will Retail Sales numbers and the Michigan Sentiment data. Be sure to come back here and not only see the data but to get my commentary.

Now a look at the chart of the Dow. You will notice that yesterday's drop of 267 points had the Dow go below the 200 day Moving Average. The same is true for the S&P 500 chart. Also notice that the Volume has picked up each day this week and yesterdays went above the average long trend volume. So the day was a significant Distribution day. Expect this downtrend to continue today with the news on the Initial Jobless Claims. The Hammer pattern discussed in the earlier post of Aug. 5th came through as a predictor of yesterdays' drop. It is worth the time to follow those Candlestick patterns.