Tweet of the Day (Part Deux)
Positions: None.
Stock Market Today, Today
Let’s try this again. We had a tech issue turning this on yesterday, but it’s live now!
Welcome to our new Stock Market Today feature. It’s a live market blog that we’ll be using for more immediate and lighter-weight content than many of our normal articles.
We hope you enjoy. Please feel free to leave a comment below and also note that you can continue the discussion on each entry by clicking the “Discuss This” button in each post. It’s a neat little feature our dev team added.
-Jason
Premarket Percentage Movers
Source: TheStreet Pro
No Coke, Pepsi?
Positions: Long KO VS
Another Marijuana Moment
Tomorrow is D-Day for Rescheduling news:
Position: None
Rally Dreams, Millions of Jobs on Thin Ice, Canada Keeps It Together
Can the rally realistically continue another day? Also, when taken together, these 4 charts show a shaky situation for tens of millions of workers.
Tweet of the Day
Position: None
Kill the Machines Before They Kill Our Markets
* Monday was another day of divergences — with interest rates moving higher and foul market breadth.
* Meanwhile, momentum-based products and strategies (that know everything about price and nothing about value) followed the strong intraday price momentum and ignored the aforementioned divergences.
The S&P Short Range Oscillator moved further into oversold territory at -0.66% vs. -0.08%.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s “Regrets” column, I missed an opportunity to short the gap higher yesterday because of machine/algo-derived market uncertainty and volatility.
Let me explain…
‘Buyers Live Higher, Sellers Live Lower‘
Today’s market structure, as I have previously noted, has produced an unpredictable short-term pattern of equity prices. The ever-growing treasure chests of index funds control stock floats and the pods and other momentum-based quant funds have become the marginal buyer/seller (in which unemotional machines and algorithms dominate much of the trading activity of passive strategies and structures).
Yesterday the “buyers lived higher” — serving to exaggerate the day’s advance. The problem I have and others have is that one simply doesn’t easily know when the buying will be sated and how high the machines will take stocks higher.
On Monday, with S&P futures more than +65 handles, the buying just stopped (without a catalyst) and the S&P fell by about -30 handles into a large ($8 billion) market on close imbalance. This morning S&P futures are -5 handles (-0.05%). (The Nasdaq, in percentage terms, is down more -0.40%.)
Importantly Monday’s advance was featured by the conspicuous divergences of higher interest rates and poor breadth — two signposts that usually lead me to short the indices:
* Another rise in interest rates ($TLT ended at the day’s lows).
* Market breadth was foul:
“Kill the machines before they kill our markets.”
Position: None
Are You Ready for a Stock Picker’s Market?
Seventy percent of active managers are trailing their benchmarks, and the pressure to catch up could trigger a focus on stock picking.