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Daily Market Update – January 25, 2016 (Close) The week gets off to its start once again being led by the price of oil, which was again sinking in the early morning. After about a 23% increase in the price in just a couple of days, you can’t blame people for taking short term profits, especially as there was no real news to account for the rise in price, other than perhaps having been in a really oversold condition. That’s not good enough to sustain a move. The good news was that the stock market was still following the oil market, but it was not doing so in a big way. Maybe that’s because traders were still snowed in somewhere, even though things should be reasonably back to normal and you don’t really need to leave your house to trade. At least that was the situation early in the session, but that all changed. I was not too anxious to do much of anything this week, so I’m glad that today did nothing to entice me. I certainly didn’t want to chase the late week gains, but I’d have been happy to commit some money if I thought those gains were going to be more than just transient ones, as has been the case for the past 2 months. And today. There are still some potentially big market movers this week with an FOMC announcement and the latest GDP report, but it’s really anyone’s guess what the FOMC will say in light of the less than robust economic activity since rates were raised and there’s no clue as to what GDP may look like after a lackluster holiday sales season. What’s also a big question mark is how any news would be greeted. Will good news be bad or will it be good? At the moment it’s hard to see any news being interpreted as being good. That’s more than enough uncertainty to keep me on the sidelines awaiting some kind of meaningful feeling of where things are headed. What we do have this week are some big earnings announcements. So far, no one has been bowled over by the first 2 weeks of those, but maybe some good news from the likes of Apple and Microsoft could give markets some reason to be optimistic about what may be in our future. For one, I just hope that there is a reason to have that optimism and get back on a path of some trading activity. Last week was just horrible in not having made any trades at all. At least this week has a number of ex-dividend positions to generate some income, but ultimately, it’s trades that drive the ship. Today that ship was in dock and it may not be going anywhere too soon. . . |
