Bernanke Talk

Submitted by Mark Hanna

Courtesy of MarketMontage. View original post here.

There really is not much new in the conference call.  The bottom line is if things worsen the Fed is prepared to act.  Ben told us this today, and Ben told us this 3-4 weeks ago on a Monday morning when the market spiked.  What threw the market for a loop were the FOMC minutes released in between today’s speech and the one from that Monday morning.  Of course the FOMC minutes came from a meeting BEFORE that Monday morning speech so it made no sense to react to them the way the market did, but you can’t argue with a mob.

As to the market we are at the very top of this range that has been where the market has been sitting in most of the month.  Rather than these huge spikes up and down, covering 30-40 S&P points in 2 days, what would be HEALTHY would be a absorption of this 2 day run with a SLIGHT pullback or sideways action.  And then an assault on the S&P 1400+ level.

Unfortunately another very heavy dose of economic data next week with the ISM’s and employment data, along with PMI data in Europe/China – which we already saw from the flash readings this week will be relatively dour.  The U.K. is also officially back in recession as of the data released this morning.  But that’s backwards – and market participants will be interested to see if the U.S. can recover some momentum from the last batch of data reports.   With Apple out of the way, the one stock that can move global markets in an instant is out of the way but we’ll still have another week of the Dow/larger S&P 500 names to deal with.  A week from Friday the data deluge will slow down.  But Europe still hangs over our heads.

In the very near term last week’s highs of 1392.76 sit right ahead.  A measly 2 points from here.

p.s. For Fibonacci fans – the upper 1350s was a 23.6% retracement of the Dec to Apr move.  A move to just under 1340 would/could be a 38.2%.  If “that’s it” for the correction, a 23.6% correction of such a strong multi month move would be mighty impressive.  Too early to call but just for reference.

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