New Week's Pre-Market

Yesterday after morning after coming back from the dentist, I considered writing about the abbreviated Futures session that ended at 11 a.m. EDT, however with stocks closed, bonds, etc, it would almost be like writing about a market in which only half of the S&P was open and no other major averages, there's so much interplay between stocks, bonds, currencies, credit, etc that just an abbreviated futures session alone seemed like it would have been a waste of your time and in fact, it would have been.

ES (S&P futures) are basically where they were at Friday's close even though they ran up about 4 points yesterday morning, we are going in to a mixed opening so far with the SPX and Dow looking like a small gap down, the NDX with a small gap up and the R2K just about flat, so indeed it would have been a waste.

As far as today however, after hitting a brief minor new high last night, futures have slipped back toward Friday's 4 p.m. level.

While there was a ton of news stories over the weekend, I thought twice about those as well and I'm glad I did as thus far none have made much of a difference at all.

There was more economic news like the BOJ continuing asset purchases (QE) to get to q 2% inflation target, some overnight fears in Germany about a possible split (or a model of a split) of Deutsche Bank, which were forgotten shortly after when the German Zew Poll was published (which is a sort of poll of economic expectations) and came in stronger than expected. Again a lot of news that seems big, but then fades rapidly or what I'd call a waste of time.

There was more news out of Spain with Q4 Spanish housing prices having fell nearly -10% from a year ago.

The one thing that I have been watching and do think matters is the movement in FX land, especially the EUR/USD.

These are the 2 parabolic moves up that I was suspicious of mid January and since a symmetrical triangle has formed, this could be a key pivot area, although with the triangle I'd expect some game playing.

Since the European open at the green arrow above on the 1 min chart, there's been some real volatility as the triangle takes on its shape. This will be one of the key currencies to watch early this week as well as key leading indicators.