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Daily Market Update – February 3, 2016 (9:00 AM) Yesterday was just another of those terrible days where the market decided after having tried for a couple of days to break away from oil, to just keep following it lower. After 3 consecutive days of gains and looking as if maybe the market would finally make that break, yesterday it was back to the same old and tiresome association. This morning’s futures has a very small bounce in it, but still far off from atoning for yesterday’s loss. It’s hard to remember when we last had any really good news, other than perhaps the short term embrace of the FOMC’s decision to raise rates back nearly 2 months ago. Ever since the very early part of December it has really been a straight line downward, with an occasional blip higher that has almost always been very quickly erased. Since having reached a recovery high in that early part of December from the previous high in August 2015, the market is now down another 9% or so and 2016 is shaping up to be one that can’t wait for 2017 to finally arrive. Going on the third week of not having made any trades, the only regret that i have is having made some trades to open new positions. Every time it looked as if it might be safe to come out and test the waters, it’s been a foolish thing to do. I’ve gotten to the point of trying to wait for some sense of stability and was hoping that yesterday could have been a continuation of the previous 3 trading days, but now it’s back to square one. While I like volatility, I’d like it much more if I could be doing some trading at the same time, especially selling new calls on existing positions or rolling positions over. That just hasn’t been the case, so there is no advantage to the volatility. For now, stability is far more important and any moves higher would be much better if coming in smaller increments, rather than 300 or 400 point gains, which only lead to 300 or 400 point losses. Today will likely be another day of watching, although there may be some opportunity to make a call sale or two, as I was trying to get that done yesterday and couldn’t get a bid at prices I thought were fair. Maybe today, if the market can continue and then add onto the bounce that the futures are indicating. That would be nice, but hoping for nice things has been disappointing now for the longest of times. . . |
