Submitted by Mark Hanna
Courtesy of MarketMontage. View original post here.
The headline refers to the site not the market. 
Tried to do an upgrade the web hosting company suggested to speed up the site and the new service was trying to direct to a website that started with www, hence put the site in an infinite loop of sorts. So if you tried to access the site after noon yesterday that was the issue. Tech support guy #2 figured it out.
As for the market yesterday was the worst loss of the year for the S&P 500. At -0.4%. A pretty amazing January as we close out the month today. I’d expect tomorrow morning’s employment data to push us one way or the other in the near term. As mentioned yesterday before we went off line the Russell had been diverging the past few sessions – at the time I wrote it, there was a 0.5% divergence and it grew as the day passed. While the very near term overbought conditions are being cleared up by the “rotating corrections” under the surface, we’re still very overbought on the intermediate term in just about every sector and index. Note RSI for example. Of course this could be cleared up by 3-5 days of sideways action and then a new leg up, just as easily as a downward trajectory in prices. We saw that in the first half of the month.
Transports have been a massive outperformer and yesterday was the first real hiccup there – I am using this chart as an example of what was seen in quite a few sectors yesterday. Again, RSI incredibly extended. There is nothing unhealthy with some correcting to create more stable entry points.
One other thing to note is the move into more safe areas by investors the past few days – as markets continue to rotate from one group to another note the move into utilities and staples.
A lot of people are also noting the breakdown in a few junk bond ETFs yesterday
So after a huge January the near term question is do we have a catalyst to shake out some of the late arriving longs or will we just continue to chug along the very top of this channel day after day. Keep in mind there are now three gaps in the S&P 500 chart – (1) the mid November reversal, (2) the Jan 2 “fiscal cliff is kicked” in the 1420s, and (3) 1472 from a few weeks back.
In econ data weekly claims spiked from the 330Ks area of the past two weeks, closer to 370K. Personal incomes surged which might catch some headlines but please recall all the special dividends hoisted out by companies ahead of the rise in tax rates for the upper 1%. Seeing personal incomes on an upward trajectory would be a huge benefit for this economy as almost all secular changes are pointing against that (in the bottom 2/3rds of the country), but this seems like a tax avoidance anomaly. As for the FOMC Bernanke said nothing new in the statement, other than weather played an impact on the slowdown in the fourth quarter. (Umm, not as much as the federal government playing games with their timing of defense spending)
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Any securities mentioned on this page are not held by the author in his personal portfolio. Securities mentioned may or may not be held by the author in the mutual fund he manages, the Paladin Long Short Fund (PALFX). For a list of the aforementioned fund’s holdings at the end of the prior quarter, visit the Paladin Funds website at http://www.paladinfunds.com/holdings/blog
