Initial Impressions

I haven't ben able to dig through all of the charts I usually look at due to a StockFinder corrupt file and a totally new data update which takes some time, but here's what I've found and found to be interesting thus far.

First AAPL was all over the place in pre-market after they announced a dividend and a share buyback. I think it was about the time Microsoft introduced their dividend that it totally killed growth in their share price. Secondly, it's been pretty widely reported that 2 days out of the box, the new I-pads are overheating. On a side note I saw the Samsung Galaxy today and if I were to start over, I'd take the Galaxy over an i-phone/i-pad combo.

The most interesting feature of the market today was that it couldn't hold on to intraday gains.  The Russell 2000 gave up -1.57% of intraday gains from yesterday's close and closed at +.89%; the S&P gave up .70% of its intraday gains from yesterday's close to the intraday highs to close at +.39%, they both gave back a substantial percentage of today's move and most of this in the last hour and a half of the day. The Dow-30 closed at +0.04% or for all practical purposes, unchanged and thus gave up just about all of today's gains which weren't much, but we saw the weakness early in Industrials for the first time in a while. NDX gave up the least of its intraday gains to close at +0.77% with AAPL's support.

Financials gave up nearly 1.6% of intraday gains to close at +0.57%, just about a 66% retracement.


Again, most of the gains were lost in an hour and a half, some even less, some a bit more, but on no news.

Specifica financial stocks seemed to get hit the worst even though financials were the clear leader most of the day. On a closing basis, 1 in 3 financials closed either down or at 0%.


Discover (DFS) retraced 66% of today's move, Keycorp retraced over 50% with an intraday gain of nearly 3.3%, closing at 1.41%, all of that was lost in the last 2 hours.

BAC had a gain of over 3% today and closed down -2.76%.

Capital One gave back 66% of today's gains as they were up +3.1% earlier leaving a very parabolic spike the last week.

Citi gave back well over 66% today as it was up +4.66% earlier and closed at +1.31% and leaving a very long tailed Shooting Star closing candle.

RF was up +2% and gave all of that back and then some closing down -.94%

These are just a few of the Stress Test banks I looked at.

Take a look at Sector rotation, specifically Financials at the bottom in green from yesterday to today...

 Look how strong Financials were among the major Industry groups and since yesterday at the left.

This is the afternoon rotation, Financials fell off badly while defensive Healthcare and Staples started rotating in. Basic Materials fell off too, but again, there was no FX based reason for that.

Here's another view of intraday Financial momentum vs the SPX.

Momentum on the downside in financials really picked up just before 3 p.m.

I mentioned earlier also that it was strange to see Industrials fall off as you can see in both charts above, but looking at a longer view...

Today wasn't good to Industrials, which I suspect were being used to prop the market up because of the large cap weighting.

It seems clear the catalyst to move the market higher was the settlement of the Greek CDS auction as the EUR/USD pair took off, but what the catalyst was to give back so much today is an unknown, there was no news and the currency pair didn't pullback enough to cause this much intraday damage. As a matter of fact, the pair still hasn't moved much.

The move up here is what primed the market, the declines started around 2 p.m. at the orange arrow, by 4 p.m. the pair was close to unchanged from 2 p.m. (the red arrow) and still hasn't given back anywhere near 25%, much less 66%.

There wasn't any funny trade that caused the dollar to weigh on the market, it was range bound most of the day.

In the morning the dollar lost ground as the Euro gained it (white box) which is helpful for equities, most commodities and precious metals, but looking at the Russell 2000 in red, you can see around 2:40 it was moving down and the dollar was absolutely flat. Had the dollar gained, the move down in the market in the afternoon would have made some sense.

 While the dollar didn't mov much in the afternoon, the carry trade below did

 Australian Dollar intraday vs the SPX

And as I pointed out there's been a trend of an unwinding of the carry trade used to finance equity purchases (note the dates below, this isn't intraday).

There was a story about Russian Special forces entering Syria, however I don't think that had anything to do with it as crude would have been much more sensitive to the news.

 USO was range bound almost the entire day. The more sensitive Brent Crude below looks as if it almost lost a little ground.

As for the Energy complex overall,

Here's the past couple of days, I don't see any abnormal trade there.

As I mentioned today and have numerous times (I wouldn't say it so much if we didn't see it so much), "I don't trust parabolic moves".

 Here's the IWM from late yesterday to this morning, the entire parabolic climb was erased and this usually how parabolic moves end. This is a small intraday example.

Here's the IWM today on a 15 min chart, if that doesn't look like a parabolic move, I'm not sure what would. Typically they are a little steeper on the right side and look at the volume on the way down.

I took a quick look at the Price/Volume relationships and sure enough, all 4 averages were dominant...

All of them were dominant in Price Up/ Volume Down which is the most bearish of the 4 relationships and more often then not, we see a move down the next day so it's almost like an overbought indication as well. Look at the Dow, it only had 1 stock with the most bullish relationship, Price Up/Volume Up; the S&P only had 32, and the NASDAQ 100 had 5!

Last, Credit continues to sell...

High Yield which would normally rally in a risk on environment has been selling off vs the SPX.

All in all,  it's generally not a good sign when market's can't hold gains (of course pullbacks and profit taking are to be expected, but today went above and beyond that), even though today they seemed a bit excessive.


More as it develops in ES or I find it.