Earlier this week, we saw a spike in the US dollar. After months of being stuck in a sideways trading pattern, the US dollar is starting to aggressively move upward:
Equity markets are in the throes of the "dog days" of summer and had a sleepy week with an upside bias. Thursday was the pivotal day as a number of indexes penetrated significant resistance which signals a short to intermediate term bull market.
If you thought last week's commentary was brief wait until you see this one. Other commitments preclude me from composing anything other than a very brief report.
Stocks ended the week higher with the S&P 500 registering a 1.07% gain for the week. Here's the S&P 500 SPDRS ETF which mimics the S&P 500 Index:
We had the first big event of this week today when the Fed's Open Market Committee (FOMC) wrapped up their two day meeting with an announcement that while they were prepared to intervene should the economy continue to weaken they were on hold for now.
Although most pundits had predicted that the outcome of this meeting would turn out as it did the market didn't like it and equities ended lower on the day while the Dollar surged:
Gold is still rising after its three month decline. Additional liquidity from QE3, China's recent interest rate cut, and European bank bailouts, have inflation watchers worried about inflation spikes in the future.
The Eurozone Manufacturing PMI falls to a 2 years low and hits the 49.0 level. German, the major Eurozone economic driver is too suffering from a slower than usual domestic PMI. A drop in PMI indicates a drop in new businesses and economic output in the Eurozone. As for the Euro, it dropped significantly this morning against the US dollar (approx. 150 pips till now).
The U.S jobs report came out this morning with a better than expected results. The U.S economy gained 117K jobs and its unemployment rate fell to 9.1%. The news comes as a sight of relief for many U.S investors, after the U.S stock market (Dow Jones, etc) suffered a big drop yesterday.
Even though the market gave up a lot of the early gains that came on low participation from investors we are raising the support/resistance levels on the DJIA (DIA) (12,480/12,570) and S&P 500 (SPY) (1,316/1,331)...The support/resistance levels on the Nasdaq Composite (QQQ) (2,782/2,799) is the same...The Semiconductor Index (SOX) underperformed the indexes and was down 0.3%-the Semi ETF SMH was d
The Semiconductor Index (SOX) fared the worst in today's session with a decline of 2.9% and the Semiconductor Holders (SMH) ETF was down 3.1% on heavy volume-the SOX and SMH gapped down and have gaps between 402.66/405.48 and $33.64/$34.03, respectively-we are keeping our eyes on these levels as gap usually get filled in the near term...We are lowering the support/resistance levels on the DJIA (DI
