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Daily Market Update – June 11, 2015 (Close)
After yesterday’s 230+ point gain, you can be excused for wanting to see more, but it’s not very reasonable to do so. Lately gains have been fairly sparse and they have been reversed the following day. For a while there had been a regular alternating pattern of up and down days, but most recently that’s been superceded by a predominance of weakness. This morning, however, the pre-opening futures were at least giving some hope that the gains of yesterday would at least be preserved. Surprisingly, they were. But even more surprisingly there was the opportunity to get a trade made. One that I had been hoping to get made yesterday. Given how poor of a job those pre-opening futures have done in even predicting the opening market action in the past few weeks, with even some very large early moves being reversed shortly after the opening bell, there’s no telling what was going to be in store today, but there’s always room for hope. Sometimes hoping works, but most of the time it’s going against the prevailing currents. Now, with just 1 days left in the week and only 6 trading days left until the June 2015 option cycle comes to its end, this had been shaping up to be the second occurrence of a week with no trades. With only 3 positions set to expire this week and seemingly out of competition for either rollovers or assignment and with all ex-dividend positions now having come and gone, there’s little likelihood of any other action this week, although I never do give up on the hope. The reason the hopes were realized this morning was because the morning brought the Retail Sales Report and Jobless Claims. The expectation was that both should add to the growing data that suggests the economy itself is growing and supporting the notion that the bond traders finally have gotten it right, as interest rates continue to climb. That climb is ahead of now what is expected to be an earlier rise in rates from the FOMC. The Retail Sales Report did, in fact, support that view, although the Jobless Claims didn’t have too much to say and the futures remained essentially unchanged. That increase in Retail Sales, though, is probably the more important of the two pieces of data and does reflect some increasing consumer confidence. More importantly, confidence doesn’t really add to the economy, but sales do, so the morning’s data release is significant and should be reflected in earnings reports starting next month. As with the earlier part of the week, I assume that I’ll simply be sitting and watching things unfold. I did try to have a few trades made yesterday in attempts to sell calls on uncovered positions, but didn’t see those go through. A little bit of yesterday’s momentum continuing let one of those trades happen today in an effort to create even the barest trickles of incom Fortunately, this was another week of multiple ex-dividend positions, but that’s really not sufficient to create the income flow that I like and need to see. While this week may and likely will end up being a lost cause, next week, with a fair number of positions set to expire and with an FOMC Statement release scheduled, will hopefully offer all of the opportunities that this week hasn’t.
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