Submitted by Mark Hanna
Courtesy of MarketMontage. View original post here.
Like I said earlier – interesting week. We are selling off here late in the day which has been the case four of the five days this week – the exception being the “rip your face off” rally Tuesday. The market is looking to end down just a bit this week but excluding Tuesdays, much of the intraday action during normal hours has been down. Most of the gains have been in in premarket. Similar to some of the suspicious strange eye raising funky stuff we saw in 2010 and 2011. Obviously the thinly traded after hours are easier to move if you have a bazooka, or know someone who did.
So unless you are holding overnight and flipping positions into the morning its a tough short term environment for longs. More strategically this is the complete opposite of January-February and parts of first half of March where we had morning weakness which would get bought aggressively and almost always close on or near the highs. I remember many days thinking 11 AM “finally we are going to get a correction” and instead we’d see a steady stream of buyers in the afternoon. This is the opposite.
I will note Apple is again acting terrible and just sniffed its 50 day moving average. It has taken a lot of the good “hide out” stocks with it of late – especially in the technology space. Even names that just beat are being sold today. Instead we have strength in utilities, cigarettes, and consumers staples. Which holds up the index in a relative sense, but hides the damage being done underneath.
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