Saturday, October 22, 2011

Stock market analysis and commentary Oct. 22, 2011

The stock market had a surge yesterday on high volume and the Dow closed at a 11,808, bringing it near a 3 month high. Of course this was done on Options Expiration day. That explains the high volume, but not the surge up on the Dow. Yesterday also had one of the lower Put to Call ratio readings as seen in the chart below. Be sure to read my last post where I said to watch this ratio to go below 1.0 and head to a 0.7 reading.

What has dominated our stock market action has been Europe and the Greek debt crisis and impending crisis in Italy and Spain. there were some hopeful comments made that the meeting this weekend of the G-20 would yield some good results. Greece's Parliament did pass more austerity measures in the face of Union strikes and violence, all giving many hope that Eurozone countries will get past this problem and on solid footing. But Germany's Merkel has said to the effect, not to count much getting done at this meeting this weekend as it will take many more meetings and months or longer to solve these crisis. It didn't matter to the market traders as they jumped on the bandwagon of "hope" and drove stocks higher as the Shorts took it in their shorts with big hits in their portfolios.

The Dow trend has clearly broken above a tight range and it could have legs to go higher. I can envision a move to 12,000 is possible, but the risks to go back below 11,000 is also as strong. The 200 day moving average is at a few points below 12,000 but the line is sloping down so I don't see us going up above this level. See the 6 month chart of the Dow with the 200 day MA below:

Much will be dependent on the news from Europe. Many think that our earnings announcements will drive the market higher, but the fact is that many companies are missing their targets like Apple, The Blackstone Group, Schlumberger, Travelers Ins., Morgan Stanley ( missed w/o accounting move) and a number of other prominent companies. Remember most targets had been lowered because of the economy so even beating them is nothing really impressive with this very slow growth economy.

The best moves have been to play the wide swings in the markets due to high volatility. But this is not for amateurs. And I consider myself a amateur, as most are because we don't have the ability to execute High Frequency trade in nanoseconds like the big boys do, so we are always too early or too late for a trade to make comparable profits.

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1 Comments:

Blogger angel said...

Nice blog , good information about Equity market, I realy liked it. Thanks for sharing this. would like to read about equity tips, thanks

1:15 AM  

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