Friends
Sometime they call it a “dead cat bounce”. Stocks got off to a good start at the opening this morning, and despite some volatility, were able to stay firmly in positive territory by the close. These days, it’s difficult to declare victory whether you are a bull or a bear until the final price is posted. It would be unwise to try to declare that the correction/pull back is now behind us, but it’s also unwise to declare that what we saw today and late Friday was meaningless. Sure, there was a lot of technical damage inflicted over the past two weeks, but the 200 day moving average did hold on Friday, so I guess the bulls can take comfort in that – temporarily. At this point, let’s just take all of this one day at a time before coming to any big conclusions.
By the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 410 points to finish the day at 24,601. The S&P 500 was up 36 points to close at 2,656. Gold was up $9 to trade at $1,325 per ounce, while oil was up $.11 to trade at $59.31 per barrel WTI.
We certainly went from way overbought to way oversold in about 9 days so somewhere in between might be ok. The economic number that traders will be focused on this week is Wednesday’s CPI report. We’ll get the PPI on Thursday. We’ll also get the retail sales number on Wednesday, but inflation is the most watched item at this point in time. Let’s see what the numbers are, but we’ll stick with the idea that the Fed will raise rates three times this year. Remember, perceived potential inflation (rising wages) and interest rates rising is what spooked markets a couple of weeks ago. Stay tuned.
Have a nice evening everyone.
