|
Daily Market Update – March 3, 2016 (Close) Yesterday was another in a series of pretty satisfying days. So was today. The market didn’t move in very much of a range either of these two past days, but if you were one of those poor souls that still has positions in some beaten down commodities, it was a two day period day that saw some large percentage gains. Even though those large gains come nothing close to offsetting a year’s worth of losses, it felt good to see them helping an overall portfolio continue to outperform for 2016 and by an increasing margin. Still, it doesn’t begin to make up for the paper losses. What fascinates me is that the gains in 2 of those companies, Chesapeake Energy and Cliffs Natural Resources come after the deaths of 2 very important people in their histories. It makes you wonder who died at Transocean. The really unexpected passing of the founder of Chesapeake Energy yesterday, just a day after his Federal indictment was a real shocker, but the shares were well higher long before that news broke. Today they were much higher. Much. In the case of Cliffs Natural Resources that climb had come after the news. Both are coincidental, I suppose, as lots of beaten down positions in energy and commodities did well yesterday as the rest of the market just sort of languished in indecision. We’ll see if that pattern continues as the market seemed to not care too much about what oil was doing and failed to follow it lower and really didn’t follow it too much when it reversed course. This morning oil was mildly lower and so was the market, but intra-day swings are more and more commonplace in both markets. Today the intra-day moves were mild, but they were still in lockstep. Unless something explosive was to happen somewhere today, I imagined it would be just another day of watching. It was. Tomorrow could be that explosive day, but I’m beginning to think that may not be the case, regardless of how the numbers may actually look. Maybe we’re just ready to finally accept the possibility that the economy may be actually getting better enough to want to manage growth. How nice that would be for everyone. . . |
