Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Morning Market Comment

The headline is blazing on Marketwatch: "Futures Signal Big Losses". Most times I pay little heed, but with S&P futures down 13 and Dow futures down 95, it does appear as if a slide is on the way.

As Marketwatch says, there are a confluence of problems for the bulls:

-Durable goods orders fell 7.8% in January.
-Shanghai's Composite Index shed nearly 10%, its biggest fall in 10 years, amid profit-taking sparked by concerns that the government may implement new measures to cool speculative behavior. See Asia Markets.
-Japanese Yen futures up 123 points! Carry trades being unwound following the China selloff. See Currencies.

The news has taken commodities down across the board, including energy and metals.

My stop for gold futures is quite a bit below the present levels and of course I won't be selling any GLD.

Interesting with the China woes, I have an open put position in Baidu.com (BIDU) which has been SUFFERING, so today that will actually rebound, w/BIDU down about 5%.

I also have various open March and April VIX call position ( my insurance against a drop in the market) so it will interesting to see what happens there.

Here's Tuesday's stocks to watch from Marketwatch.com

10:00 ET existing home sales are due, which could added additional volatility into the market picture.

1 comment:

Bill Luby said...

Jim,

How much of an impact do you think the China sell off will have on the metals markets? What I've seen so far looks fairly muted. Do we need another shoe to drop for anything dramatic to happen to the metals?