Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Issue Contents:
| 09:11 | Swing Scanner Results Friday January 14th closing data. |
| 09:12 | Market Statistics For Friday January 14th |
| 09:21 | The Day Ahead Economic releases and news. |
| 09:41 | Swing Trade Setups |
| 10:06 | Quick Take: Currencies |
| 12:03 | Administrative Note New features coming, scheduled site down time this week. |
| 12:51 | Economic News and Commentary Foreign investors fund the party for another day. |
| 16:15 | TrendVue Trader Talk Today's transcript. |
Friday January 14th closing data.
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Statistics for Friday January 14, 2005
Note: Statistics are compiled based on our custom symbol universe of the most heavily traded stocks.
| Symbols in Up Swings | 406 |
|---|---|
| Symbols in Down Swings | 360 |
| Up/Down Swing Ratio | 1.12 : 1 |
| Advancers | 75% |
| Decliners | 23% |
| Unchanged | 2% |
| Up Bars | 37% |
| Down Bars | 30% |
| Inside Bars | 22% |
| Outside Bars | 6% |
| Close > 20EMA | 75% |
| Close > 50SMA | 42% |
| Close > 200SMA | 63% |
| 20EMA > 50SMA > 200SMA (trend up) | 29% |
| 20EMA < 50SMA < 200SMA (trend down) | 22% |
Good morning – its Tuesday January 18th and crude oil is trading near two-month highs, currently at $49.30. Stock index futures are off somewhat, before the regular session starts.
We have a lot on the go today, more news later.
US Market Calendar
- 8:30 am: Empire State Manufacturing Survey – Jan.1
- 9:00 am: Foreign Purchases of U.S. Securities – Nov.
- 10:00 am: State Street Investor Confidence Index
- 1:00 pm: NAHB Housing Index – Jan.
- 3 & 6-month T-bill auction
Canadian Market Calendar
- 8:30 am: Leading Indicators – Dec.
Earnings and the Federal Reserve
For earnings highlights, please see today's WSJ Earnings Calendar.
For a list of upcoming speeches, congressional testimony, Federal Open Market Committee material, and statistical releases, please visit the What's Next page of The Federal Reserve Board website. Recently released Federal Reserve Board material, including market moving FOMC decisions and speeches by members, will be found on their What's New page.
Federal Reserve Presidents and Govenors are busy speaking today – keep an eye on their published speaches, usually released as they start to talk – these occasionally move markets or make them jumpy at least.
- 8:15 AM ET : Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank President Anthony Santomero to speak about the U.S. economic outlook, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
- 9:00 AM ET : Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Gary Stern to speak about business conditions and prospects to the Financial Planners Association in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
- 1:00 PM ET : Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Sandra Pianalto to speak about monetary policy perspectives at the Association for Corporate Growth conference, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
- 3:00 PM ET : Richmond Federal Reserve Bank President Jeffrey Lacker to speak about technology and labor markets, at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina
- 8:00 PM ET : Federal Reserve Governor Susan Schmidt Bies to speak about the U.S. economy and retirement savings challenges, in Baltimore, Maryland.
1 Empire State index weaker than expected in January State index weaker than expected in January
Please review today’s real-time TrendVue Trader Talk chat log (updates every 2 minutes) or join us in the room – I’ll be posting a number of long and short trade setups in the next few minutes.
First, the index—US dollar breaks out of recent range, pulls back, and is threatening to break out again. Its now or never time for the buck, and by extension, the precious metals complex.
US Dollar Index
Other major currencies are also at very important junctures – with “2B” Tests of Bottom showing up here ont he daily charts, and in the case of the Yen, a retest of a major underweight right now.
EURUSD – retesting the recent swing low.
GBPUSD – so far this morning looks to be making a stand at its prior swing low, although is clearly below resistance here until / unless the upper resistance line is cleared.
After markets close today the TrendVue web site will be down for periods of time while I work on a number of fixes and new features. Over the course of this week, Murphy willing, I hope to put in place substantial changes, but that will depend in part on how much time I get for project work.
Over the last month I“ve been working on some new technology, with overly ambitious goals designed to permanently delay release! Some of the things I am working on include some boring things:
- Changes to site and client management which will allow users to self-help themselves through many changes, from email address changes to subscription start and stop requests.
- Implementation of a web-forms based contact and request system which will do away with the need (for me) to wade through literally thousands of SPAM messages each and every day. Our public-facing and some of our private email addresses have been inundated with SPAM for many weeks now which makes managing a business rather difficult, and frustrating for clients and myself alike. Our new request tracker will do away with this problem once and for all, hooray!
- Improvements to our search engine
- Resolving a few issues which have been creeping up as our software which drives the site ages – it was time to re-factor some of the code and tighten things up.
Some of the features are self-serving, designed to help me manage my trading day more effectively by improving my work-flow, which will allow me to produce more quality analysis each and every day. However, most features are client-oriented, and some of the less boring things coming up include:
- Categorization of posts and navigation by topic, not just by date. Soon you’ll be able to navigate the site by subject matter. For example, if reading a post on economics and you want to see other, similar, newsletter entries, you’ll be able to navigate through the “economics” topic. Classification of our older material is well under weigh – we have many hidden gems in the archives and this process will help us find them again.
- Automatic linking of key concepts to documents in the knowledge base by keywords or “glossary” items. This is an important feature which will help traders and investors new to swing trading and technical analysis get up to speed more quickly.
- Clients may subscribe to specific topics of interest, or the daily newsletter itself, and (optionally) receive email or RSS (more on this later) alerts or full text extracts.
- A beta run with a new on-line chat facility that does not use Java – it is firewall friendly and requires no additional software be installed on your machine. In addition to eliminating annoying Java related issues and time-outs, the new chat also allows us to integrate more tightly with the web site, display charts in-line (a big plus!), and will allow us to directly link to topics in the knowledge base, thus helping speed knowledge transfer.
- A beta run with a “comments system” that will allow clients to respond directly to articles in the newsletter. Technically this isn’t difficult, but I fear that it could impact my time depending on how popular the feature becomes, so initially it will be run on a limited trial basis.
Speaking of knowledge transfer, when the core new features are in place I will be revamping much of our knowledge base material and publishing a number of new techniques and setups articles to build out this resource.
Also on the list for delivery over the next six weeks are a couple of top-secret tools I’ve been working on which will help swing traders more effectively manage their trading activity and work-flow. More on this when we are ready to go to beta with this new functionality.
This morning’s report on foreign purchases of US Securities showed an unexpectedly strong result, albeit after last month’s surprisingly weak report:
WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) – Net inflows of capital into U.S. assets surged to an unexpectedly high $81.0 billion in November, according to a Treasury Department report on Tuesday.
“The data is encouraging but the jury is still out,” said Brian Garvey, senior currency strategist with State Street Global Markets in Boston. More >
Noted online, The Real Interest Rate Conundrum, by Stephen Roach – Morgan Stanley
Lacking in domestic saving, America then must import foreign saving in order to grow—and run massive current account deficits to attract that capital. The resulting persistence of outsize trade deficits is a recipe for trade frictions and protectionist risks. Moreover, asset-based consumption also entails a bias toward ever-increasing household sector debt loads—leverage that is manageable for only as long as real rates stay low. While low real rates may keep the party going, the celebration is hardly without consequences.
Which brings us to the endgame—how world financial markets and the global economy are weaned from abnormally low real interest rates. This is likely to be a delicate surgical operation, to say the least. More >
Today's transcript.
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