Daily Market Update – March 26, 2014 (Close)

 

  

 

Daily Market Update – March 26, 2014 (Close)

Another day of no news and another day of an upward pointing market to get us started. Who knew that the market would later decide otherwise in the absence of any reason to have reversed direction?

With little in store for the rest of the week there wasn’t too much reason to think that this pattern of upward movement wouldn’t just continue, particularly since next week is another Employment Situation Report and that has had a long standing record of being the conclusion to positive market weeks.

It’s that kind of confidence and certainty that can get you into trouble.

This week has so far been a mildly positive one on all counts, but I would take “mildly positive” week after week, as opposed to some of the alternating and unpredictable big moves that can come our way.It certainly hasn’t been a very exciting week, but excitement can be over-rated. While I like to trade, all of that excitement is long in the past and forgotten once I look at the changing bottom line at the end of each day and especially at the end of each week.

The bottom line trumps everything. I can always use that bottom line to help get the excitement I crave in other ways.

The manner in which the market behaved today didn’t do much to bring a solution to the lack of market related excitement, but it did help erase some bottom line related excitement.

At the mid-way point for the week I wasn’t actively looking for or expecting any new purchases, although as next week’s expiring options become available for more positions starting tomorrow and still having cash to spend, the story may have been expected to shift a bit, but it never really did, as I just couldn’t get much of a level of comfort with today’s trading.

In the meantime any opportunities to find additional cover would have been appreciated, but they never really materialized. While I continue to want to create additional streams, even at the expense of greater maintenance need for positions, such as Cisco, which was the object of a “mini-DOH” trade, yesterday, thre market just didn’t offer the opportunity. Those come best when shares are trading into price strength, rather than retreating from strength..

Fortunately, there’s still a couple of more days for traders to come to their senses and try to understand why they drove up those shares by about 3.5% on a day when there was no news for a stock that tends to trade with very low volatility except in the absence of news, such as earnings.

As with the DOH trade of Target about a month ago which suddenly shot up beyond the strike and is now looking as if it is coming to an end after some rollovers, the extra maintenance may turn out to be worth an additional 1.5% or so, while waiting for its return to its original strike price.

Today, as has been the case for the past week or two, most of the attention was focused on today’s IPO, this time of the maker of the fad game, Candy Crush. With mos
t of its revenues based on a single game and a valuation in excess of $7 billion, it’s hard to keep a straight face as the market is set to embrace the debut.

In what can’t be a good sign, despite the vain and pitiful attempt to spin it as good news, trading opened at almost 10% below the IPO price.

That valuation is one thing, but the announcement of Facebook’s purchase of “Oculus” the maker of a virtual reality head piece for $2 billion, just a couple of months after a second round of funding valued it at about $250 million, is an attention getter.

Maybe, just maybe, that was partly responsible for Facebook’s terrible day today and helped spread it through to other momentum stocks, as there may be people wondering whether the market is getting a little too ahead of itself and reminding some of an ear of sock puppets.

For some reason, and I may not be justified in thinking this, I’m reminded of the movie line “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”