Here’s is today’s intra-day action of $SPY. It’s good to look back at previous days to compare the different times and patterns during reversals and market conditions.
You can look at previous Intra-day journals here
Today we had a strong bullish trend day. Trying to short SPY today was not a good idea. On strong trending days it’s best to wait for opportunities to buy. I’ve included a couple of examples below. The Bears had very few moments of control and the TICK shows only one -1000 reading which was actually good for the Bulls. The -1000 reading had very little volume and price expansion to the downside signaling the Bulls still were buying up all the supply.
News Driver: Bank of Japan cuts interest rates, ECB inflation inline and US GDP not as bad as expected.
Into today’s open Bank of Japan Kuroda is creating risk-on (temporarily) by going NIRP (negative interest rates -0.1% on excess bank reserves), ECB Inflation metrics printing Goldilocks (Core +1% vs forecast +0.9%), and Q4 2015GDP for the US slightly missing forecast (better than market was expecting) +0.7% vs forecast of +0.8%
Yellen disappointed markets yesterday not being as dovish and defacto implying the move in Dec 2015 was spooking investors. The statement does lower odds of a March 2016 rate hike, but on the basis of a global slow down.
Read last nights Market Re-cap for more details
The markets sold off after the announcement but did not break major support floors, the S&P 500 held above 1,880-1,870 and we maintained the HOLD decision for mid-to-longer-term positions into yesterday’s close.
News Driver: Oil and earnings will be the focus today as we enter another heavy earnings day today. European markets are down moderately between -.6% and -1.5%. Asian markets had some choppy trading and closed slightly down with Hang Seng up +.75%. China was the laggard again down -2.61%
Pre-market we see a mixed sentiment towards equities, leaning risk-off in the Eurozone, and leaning risk-on in North America.
Here’s a peak at the eMini Futures contract….
It was an interesting day for the markets that started weak form Risk off (investors not buying high risk assets) then quickly turned RISK ON (buying higher risk assets) after the Crude Oil Inventory number was released.
The number was a huge build of 8.383M over the forecasted of 3.277M but Oil immediately rallied. The bad news was expected and oil traders took oil on a nice run to $32.84.
The S&P 500 has been strongly correlated to the oil market and rallied also. However, the mood changed quickly after the 2PM FOMC rate announcement. Rates were left unchanged but Yellen’s dovish comments spooked the markets and the STRONG RISK OFF selloff began with some substantial volume.