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Daily Market Update – February 2, 2016 (Close) Yesterday was a pretty nice day on a couple of levels. Making a trade of any sort was not among those levels, though. What was nice was that there was actually a small gain on the day and that represented a nice comeback from a sharp decline early in the trading. What was especially good, however, is that while oil prices were plunging yet again, they didn’t take the market along for the ride. Even that early decline in the indexes wasn’t anywhere near where it could have been, given oil’s descent and the way the market had been reacting to those kind of declines for the past few months. So I did get at least one day of the stability that I had been hoping for, but there’s still not enough to really have much in the way of confidence when it comes to putting new money on the line. But that was yesterday. This morning the futures were again weak and the day just got worse and worse as oil went lower and lower. Now, with 3 days left for the week, there’s not much in the way of direction until Friday’s Employment Situation Report is released. Based on last week’s reaction to the weak GDP, there’s reason to believe that the market would be happy with weak Employment numbers maybe in the hope that then the FOMC wouldn’t go ahead and increase the interest rate any time soon. Ultimately, that can’t be a recipe for success going forward, but it may be all that the market can really hope for, as earnings by Facebook and Google aren’t going to make up for weak earnings numbers coming from just about everything else and those oil company earnings are very sobering. Right now, there isn’t really a single sector of the market that is performing well or can inspire any kind of confidence. What started out as less bleak this morning became very bleak in the snap of the finger. No matter how good Facebook and Google may be, they just don’t reflect anything in the economy, at all. Today brought that lesson home. This morning’s early futures performance was likely to lead to yet another day of just watching and waiting for some kind of a sign that a bottom is developing and maybe then being prepared to dip a toe. The way the day developed there was still no reason to think that it was yet safe to do anything. Now we just sit and await Friday and scratch our heads trying to figure out just what investors want. . . |
