ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
The volatility index, the VIX, has closed below 11 for 5 straight days and 22 of the last 25. These stretches of extremely low volatility (I will now shorten it to ELV for convenience) include a 14-year low for the VIX. The interruption in this streak of ELV included an abrupt wake-up call where the … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on January 9, 2017. Click here to read the entire piece.) Two years ago, I wrote “The Problem with the January Barometer.” {snip}… the January barometer failed one more time with 2016 delivering a stellar 9.5% gain. Hopefully, 2016 helps put the … Read more
In a previous post on the stock market, I noted how commodity-related plays were apparently benefiting from a sagging U.S. dollar index (DXY0). I failed to note that oil was (and is) a glaring exception. Oil futures fell around 9% for the week. This plunge was enough to completely reverse last month’s rally for United … Read more
A recent article in Business Insider by Jesse Felder from TheFelderReport.com raised a loud alarm bell over rising margin debt levels in the U.S. stock market (see “A closely followed indicator says a 20% drop in stocks could be coming soon“). The article used the following chart as part of an analysis concluding that a … Read more
We hear the relationship claimed so casually and so frequently, we probably no longer give it a second thought. For example, on December 30th, the S&P 500 (SPY) lost 0.7%. Searching for an explanation, CNBC ran the all-too familiar headline “Dow closes down triple digits as oil slide weighs.” Oil lost 3.3% on the day … Read more