ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
Stock Market Commentary: A divergence still exists between the anxiety in financial markets and market breadth, but that divergence is no longer so promising. Sellers rushed into the close as rumblings rolled of an escalation in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. After Putin followed through with a nighttime strike against Ukraine, stock market futures sold off sharply. … Read more
Stock Market Commentary A promising week of post-oversold trading ended in tensions over inflation, interest rates, and Ukraine. Overall, the stock market remains locked in churn. Yet, the view from individual stocks can provide cause for greater alarm. End of the week selling in big cap tech raised a red flag against my overall bullishness … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Last week was full of dramatic price swings. Traders reacted in extreme ways to key earnings results. The wild behavior cascaded out to related stocks. Some of the collateral damage in the blast radius likely came from portfolio managers scrambling to rebalance holdings. I expect this kind of action to continue through … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The stock market is scraping by just above oversold territory. The churn of last week has created a mosaic different trading conditions. The bears are salivating at the all-time lows. The hopefuls like me are finding slivers of opportunity in the breakouts. The stock charts in this review cover some of everything. … Read more
Stock Market Commentary: I started last week’s trading with a call for discipline over precision. That post turned out to be timely as the bears and bulls took the stock market on a wild ride through the Fed’s latest monetary policy decision (more on that in a future post). The indices plunged deeply on Monday … Read more
Stock Market Commentary I earlier wrote about a forlorn stock market writing a love note to the Federal Reserve. This love note comes in the form of a basket of sell-offs. The selling is so broad and so deep that traders could throw a dart and find descriptive stock charts. The examples below are some … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Investor psychology took an important hit this week. During the Goldman Sachs (GS) Q&A period for the Q4 2021 earnings conference call, Chairman and CEO David Solomon dropped an inflation bomb. Solomon claimed that “there is real wage inflation everywhere in the economy, everywhere” (from the Seeking Alpha transcript). Solomon responded to … Read more
Stock Market Commentary My bullishness waned with last week’s manic trading action. I called the resulting patterns choppiness toppiness to reflect a biding sense that the market is churning out some kind of lasting top. Still, under the surface of the churn is a fresh divergence. The stock market is full of digital lows and … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The stock market survived a choppy week. The churn almost looked like stabilization after a disappointing start to the new year. However, the attempt to absorb the news of a hawkish Fed is taking its toll in the form of toppiness. With each passing day I get more and more wary about … Read more
A correction in financial markets is conventionally defined as a decline of at least 10% from an all-time high. At its lows of the day, the NASDAQ (COMPQX) found itself down 9.3% from the all-time high set almost two months ago. The depths of this decline also marked an important breach: the NASDAQ traded below … Read more