Ouch! Another bad day – IF YOU THINK THE DOW MATTERS!!!
The NYSE was up 13 pts and the R2K was up 2, the 10 year note dropped and the Nas was down 5.5 and the S&P was down 1.6 – This is not a bad day, this is a mixed day…
Congress extended the dividend tax cut which, in a logical world, should be a big positive for the markets but we will have to wait and see.
The ability of these other indexes to overcome the headline disaster of the Dow and a Nas that was dragged down by NSM, TXN and INTC is amazing. MWD came out with a negative call on the semis that put a stake through the heart of the Nasdaq and S&P.
CNBC is ridiculous with a slew of headlines about THE BEAR MARKET! Now I am a bit bearish at the moment but today is the kind of day that gives me hope.
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Merck is now officially screwed. I should have been more aggressive this morning and called a short rather than just a sell on the up position. Apparently somebody sort of kind of deleted data that linked Vioxx to heart attacks in the New England Journal of Medicine.
We are talking ugly investigation and perhaps SEC involvement here. Merck may revisit its low of $25 over this mess!
There is still time to take a put position tomorrow but it will be expensive – I grabbed the current $30s but I wouldn’t advise chasing them.
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Intel is not guiding up… There goes my call (this is why we don’t do current month calls, I still have 35 days to win). They are already down $1+ after hours but I think they will hold $25. If so I will have confidence to buy this cheap into earnings. There is a conference call coming up on the 13th that will clarify this.
Money flowing out of semis is great news for PLAY! They are exempt from demand issues because their biggest customer can’t make IPods fast enough to quell demand.
Money will be flowing back into oil as it passed my $60.55 target in heavy trading (as we know, no big oil trader misses this blog!).
Gold demand may be bigger than I thought in this week’s article. I’m holding the gold stocks for now as today showed no sign of weakness but I am tightly stopped (10% of profits). If it’s a bigger rally than I think, there will be many opportunities to reenter.
RIMM and GM were racing towards oblivion all day – GM is currently in the led by a nose. Those RIMM puts worked out well too – the stock dropped $3 since the open but I’m being greedy and holding them for a while.
Trade of the Day SIRI is off to a nice start but it’s a long trade so just fuggedaboutit for now. Just remember that every time you hear Howard Stern’s name you get about a tenth of a cent – it should add up to a couple of bucks by January! There is a guy discussing how horribly obscene he is on CNBC and the ticker is going up as he speaks…
Apple made a nice recovery and so did the homebuilders.
I got stopped out of SHLD with a 15% loss, the stock couldn’t fight the markets.
Copper is as good as gold when you own the stocks – PD ran up another 3% today.
My list of overbought homebuilders did underperform their peers but still managed to go up .75% while my favorites, TOL (+3.6%) and DHI (+2%) were everyone else’s as well.
At 6am I posted about TOL: “At $34 though, this may be the most technically oversold stock I have ever seen so I will be looking for any reason to enter.” Low for the day – $33.75 for about 10 seconds! Nailed that one!!!
My screen was nice and green today but we’re still not where I want to be market-wise. I am excited to see what tomorrow will bring.
