Opening Market Observations

Good morning,

I wonder if any of you were furloughed government employees who are back to work today?  I know we have a few people who work for the government. In any case, that drama is over until February, which means the market will start to worry about it in December or so, which means it's only about a month or two that this will be off the market's mind as the unintended consequences roll in such as Dagong Ratings Agency from China downgrading the US from A to A-.

This morning GS reported and boy oh boy am I ever glad I closed that call position yesterday for less than a 1% loss as Goldman's seeming earnings beat was no beat at all, just the slashing of employee salaries, but to make $350k on average is still nothing to scoff at, but a $75k or so cut probably doesn't feel too good considering. Anyway GS is down about -3.5% in pre-market, that would have annihilated those calls, so that was the right call.

 As far as gold, I mentioned it as looking good yesterday, silver and GDX too, that should have told us something considering gold was acting as a flight to safety, I didn't pick any up because I'm overweight GDX/NUGT, but GLD is up nearly 3% in pre-market.

As for futures, that R2K Futures negative divegrence I saw last night brought the Index down slow and steady and it looks like the IWM will open down about -.70%.

So far it seems like the old Wall Street maxim, "Buy the Rumor, sell the news" and the news was made last night.

I'm going to run through currencies and keep an early eye on VXX which was added to yesterday that should open up by +1.5%.

I'll have some interesting charts in Futures in a few minutes, it's currencies and credit that I'm especially interested in today.