Quick Morning Market Comment

It's spring and it sure doesn't feel that way here in southern Pennsylvania or anywhere for that matter across the northeast. It also doesn't feel like spring in the home building industry. DR Horton says orders for new homes tumbled 37 percent. More revealing, company chairman Donald Horton says spring is not off to a strong start for the industry and folks are actually buying homes they can afford.

More trouble in techie land: Seagate Technology Updates Fiscal Third Quarter 2007 Outlook.

As noted late last night, earnings season starts this evening with Alcoa's numbers. This is the opportunity, over the next several weeks, for the bulls to get the S&P back to the highs of the year. Will the numbers give the markets enough to react to? We'll know soon enough.

Commodities are strong again. The CRB chart looks bullish, indeed which is just something else for the Wall Street bulls to worry about.

Metals in particular are strong today. Earlier gold was up more than $8/oz. Copper is trading at 6 month highs.

A hedge fund group in Brazil has its eye on consolidating the ethanol producing industry in that county according to an interesting story on the HedgeFunds Weblog.

Pete Stolcer's OneOption.com has a full list of movers this morning.

Option Sentiment Gauges:
CBOE Total Put/Call Ratio 0.78 Neutral
S&P 500 Index (SPX) P/C Ratio 1.31 Positive
S&P 100 Index (OEX) P/C Ratio 2.40 Positive
ISE Sentiment Index 109 Positive
S&P 500 Implied Volatility (VIX) 13.14 Positive
NASDAQ 100 Implied Vol (VXN) 17.77 Negative