What Happened Wednesday?

What was that? 

Not much on the whole.  We got our SOX move but the rest of the market just sort of laid there, which was a bit depressing with the Iran thing seeming to wind down.  As usual, we can blame oil which refuses to drop so now we know that the "Iran crisis" had nothing to do with the price of crude but provided the manipulators a good excuse to yank our chains and draw another $100M per day out of American pockets.

I should be happy as we are getting our tech rally but it’s not catching on and I found the Russell very disturbing as it actually lost a point on the day but the markets held up well in general on a poor ISM report:

Hmmmm, we lost a little ground on the Transports but the SOX and the Nasdaq gained some strength and the Russell point loss wasn’t enough to shift any colors so, on the whole, a pretty good day.

If only we can get oil to behave we may actually have something but it may be too much to ask at this point.  Here’s the chart, judge for yourself – I think we are having a spot of trouble going into the long weekend but I still see 330K open contracts with just 2 weeks left to go after tomorrow (20th), a fairly early close for the May contract with a LOT of barrels to be pared off.

There will be no easy roll-out this month as June is already packed with 200M barrels vs. 3/8 when there were just 457M open barrels in the two front months.  Our big drop came on the 12th last month (perfectly predicted by Zman I might add) but with 73M more barrels to dispose of, we may get  a move by Monday.

Gold attacked $680 this morning and finished up $7.70 at $677.7 (attn all numerologists), not surprising with the dollar back below 83 on more slumping economic news.

Not a very exciting day but I said this morning I would be happy to consolidate so 😎