The markets have opened lethargically Sunday night, although the S&P index futures are threatening to break out of a tiresome four-point range that has contained them for nearly five hours. It’s eerily quiet, like the noiseless moment in a slasher film just before the chain-saw wielding psychopath leaps from the shadows. Even the headlines are pregnantly subdued, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Turkey overshadowing all else. Other top stories-of-the-hour include the celebration in Libya of Qaddafi’s bloody, ignominious end; the latest non-developments in the global Occupy movement; an unexpectedly kind word for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg from the late Steve Jobs; and — this just in! — a Rangers victory in game four of the World Series. If you could chart the mood of the moment, it would feature Bollinger bands so tightly constricted they almost touch. Technicians use this tool to predict explosive moves when things seem a little too calm, as they do right now. » Read the full article
From the monthly archives:
October 2011
If you’re in the habit of fading the trend on a quiet Sunday night, you’d be long index futures and short bullion at the moment, shortly before 11 p.m. EDT. Silver seems to be holding gold back, but we needn’t speculate on the outcome, since there are clear Hidden Pivot benchmarks to tell us which side, bulls or bears, is controlling the action.
I’m not big on head-and-shoulders patterns because they are everywhere one looks for them, but if the one shown keeps pounding away at the neckline of this misshapen specimen it could trigger a two-point break. Alternatively, buyers would need to drive DXY above the 77.95 external peak to regain the offensive. If weakness implies the euro is about to surge, the headlines that we should expect to accompany such freakish behavior are difficult to imagine. Maybe this: Europe Goes All-In on Greek Debt.
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Index futures were unchanged as we went to press around 7 :30 p.m. EDT. Although for technical reasons I’ve emphasized a bullish scenario over a bearish one in the S&P tout, my gut feeling is that Thursday evening’s worrisome headlines were unlikely to produce a happy outcome by morning.
Great Recession Widens an Already Huge Retail Hole
by Rick Ackerman on October 25, 2011 2:39 am GMT · 25 comments
The retail blight that has laid waste to malls and shopping plazas across America has claimed yet another high-value victim near our Colorado neighborhood: The Great Indoors, a remodeling and redecorating megastore in Broomfield’s Flatiron Marketplace. When the Sears-owned emporium goes darks in mid-December, it will leave 58 people jobless and a 155,000-square-foot building empty. It could also sink the entire Flatiron Marketplace, since the closure will more than double the facility’s vacancy rate to 67%. That number had hovered near 30% for the last couple of years after Office Depot, Linens N Things and Nordstrom Rack departed in quick succession, leaving the shopping center’s manager with the daunting task of finding new tenants even as retail vacancies continue to soar locally and nationally. » Read the full article