Closing Market Update

Is today Thursday or Friday? The way the market is acting, I could swear it was about noon time Friday on a monthly options expiration, perhaps there's a big, juicy reward for pinning January monthlies at Max Pain.

Almost all indications of intraday trade seem to have slight steering, some oversteer and then a divergence intraday in the other direction, some slight oversteer and another divergence in the other direction all with the aim of keeping the market right here in this tight range we have seen today as if today were options expiration.

The NYSE TICK is incredibly mellow again at +/- 750 (even several months ago when we were getting consistent +.10% tiny baby moves, but consistently, the TICK data was at least pressing through +/- 1000 and often spiking to 1250/1500.

The Yen divergence is still in place (1 min) and it has had the effect on AUD/JPY, USD/JPY, EUR/JPY that I'd expect, not any big moves, but in line with the Yen's move.

Leading Indicators are flat with some minor underperformance or outperformance here and there, the only one I found interesting and partly because it's such an effective leading indicator was Yields.

This is a larger view and many divergences are on this chart, but they look like reversion to the mean because they are so small because of the size of this one now which is negative, it's a lower high in Yields at the current SPX prices and this has been a very effective leading signal.

So that's where we are at. Almost every asset is nearly frozen or has been handled today to keep this range intact.