Market comments for the coming week of Dec. 5th.

I thought it was time to post on the stock market again. The main points to make this week are that all Indexes, except the Dow, are still below their 200 day Moving average line, shown faintly with the yellow lines on each chart below. The second point is that while the Dow remains above the downward sloping red line, the Russell has remained below it the most. The Dow is most likely the most manipulated Index and the Russell the least. My opinion is that this shows the tendency is still to remain below these red lines in the intermediate timeframe.




This week will have its important announcements. The biggest news item will be the European meeting, scheduled on Dec. 8th and 9th, of Finance ministers to discuss resolving the Sovereign debt issues of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and others. This will be the most important meeting of the last year as it is the first since the coordinated Central Bank intervention to lower the rates banks pay to increase reserves. The Central Banks took this action because there was an immediate concern of a large bank failure in Europe. Our markets will react to what happens there, not here.

Market comments for Oct. 25th

Are we all excited today to see that the G-20 ended their Finance Ministers session agreeing to "try" no to do harm to each other? Traders seems thrilled today as the Dow is up about 65 points at this hour and going above the 11.200 level I said we would get to back in mid September and it may even go to the 52 week high of 11,258 before the elections.

However, I caution all you believers that this is a real Bull market Rally that Friday was the lowest Volume day since last December. When can you remember an October where Volume was so low? I can't! The Volume has disappeared this month and the Volatility Index is hitting lower lows each day, it seems, although today it is up a bit. About 10 days ago it was as low as 18. From a historic perspective, it has been much lower over the past 10 years. It was as low as 10 from about 2005-2007 and signaled the quiet before the storm which followed. In 2008 it soared to 90. So we are by no means at the lows on the VIX. But there seems to be a quiet before this election and many analysts believe that the election is already baked into the market and most likely it will selloff just when the news is in on the results. You know, it's that old "buy on the rumor and sell on the news, game.