Fed's Rally...

It's getting to the point that you can almost count on the Fed to come out with something to propel this market on a monthly basis.    The fact that this market is up 400+, the most point gain in about 5 years, suggest that market participants really liked the Fed announcements today.    The only beef people may have today is that "why wouldn't Fed foresee the problem we are having now months ago?"    Well, the truth is, it isn't a problem to Fed until it's really problematic.    In case you didn't understand what the Fed did today, it's basically trying to "save" our capital market.      Whether Fed's policy will succeed or not, we won't be able to tell for months down the road.      For now, this "temporary fix" seems to have many market participant's mojo going.  We now need to see money come off the sidelines.   The fact this move was 'unprecedented' and involved other countries getting into the act made it seem different and possibly give it some legs today without the usual sell off.   We said a bounce was conveniently set up for today, this FED just made it more so and we went after pieces of many stocks as we discussed. 

Yes, prior to today, we were down 7 out of 8 trading days and we just broke through major support coming into today.     Today's action effectively erased the fear that we were way oversold the last little while.    When you have these many points gain, you can see and tell how market participants are emotional and excited to see a good ole green day.    The question now, does today's move signify that a major rally is under way?  Did we double bottom?   On the technical side tonight, we are right back toward the previous support of around 12100 Dow and 1320 SPX, which now act as resistance.   We'd also look to IWM 67.40's as a hurdle for those watching the intraday ticks, we noted this level in alerts to watch last week for direction.   When that level cracked, it has been down all the way till today.     For a monumental move like we had today, you'd be sure that there'd be consolidation in the coming days.   This market has become very technical lately and without sustained positive news development, we believe it's very difficult to move up in a meaningful way.   Sure, we aren't taking today's move lightly,  so we'll try to stay neutral the next couple of days until we see where the next move leads us.   We still have a Fed meeting coming up next week.   Based on the reaction today, we don't think next week's meeting has that much more significance as the rate cut has been fully been priced in for a while.    What we want to see, however, is Fed's attitude toward the recent economic data which points to a recessionary environment that also tags on inflation.    So far, Fed has been mainly taking action to help out the financial sector which is the most important agenda in this market right now in our opinion.  

• One real concern is the BSC situation that must be resolved.  Good or bad to move on.  The financials, the market were acting too wildly on this stocks back today.

As far as stock action goes, this market can go from extremely oversold condition to overbought on one days move.   This is why we alerted we are backing out late in the day.   If we miss a gap up tomorrow, that's fine,  as we expect any immediate follow through to encounter resistance noted above.    Right now, we aren't going to chase any solars, shippers or technology stocks past today.   If anything, we'd be inclined to start to short some from those sectors in the coming days.    On the long side, we'll wait for agri/chem to stabilize before we re-enter after today's trade and we are sticking with some Oils & G ( BZP hit $21 ) and steel ( STLD guides higher in ah) stocks before the solars/ships/techs.     This market definitely gives headaches to those who lean heavily to one side for too long.   It's essential to have both sides covered in order to minimize the risk that the market runs the opposite direction of your plays.

Shifting Focus...

In a way, this market is getting extremely difficult to lean heavy in one direction at any point.    Even if you are a super bear, and with every economic indicator going your way, you still want to arm yourself with enough hedge to deal with a day like today.     This market started off just as everyone suspected but the turn of events in the afternoon astonishes even the most optimistic bulls.    Did it really matter what S&P said in the morning with regard to the conclusion of writedowns from major financial institutions or the housing rescue plan?    We think the market rallied because a lot of people believe that our Fed. will do anything creative to keep this market afloat, while delaying the inevitable indefinitely.     Of course, any policy announcement by Fed these days is greeted with warm welcome.   We just had a super 200 billion "cash for trash" injection announcement and now people are asking for more, at least they are hoping so.

More importantly, we have to understand why we gapped down earlier in the first place.    Perhaps our market here is solely focused on subprime and credit crunch crisis the last couple of days, while the rest of the world is however, only focusing on the weakness of the U.S. dollar and the strength of Gold/Oil.    The weakness of U.S. dollar basically hurts all those countries who export a great deal of stuff to America, which is just about everybody.    The high oil is also increasing the cost of doing business because a high percentage of fixed cost in transporting goods is the fuel.  With the dollar getting trashed, as traders, the only protection and hedge we can use is to buy gold and other base metals.     All of these factors are creating what we call an inflation environment here.     This is still in addition to the credit crunch crisis we are dealing with here that is still months away from being resolved, in our opinion.     The more Fed tries to save the capital market by boosting up the lending programs and lowering the rate, the worse it gets with the inflation as traders use every Fed policy to sell the dollar off, hard!

Fed right now is in a very difficult position as on one hand, they want to stop the bleeding in the financial market.    You have to give Fed credit these days as both the surprise rate cut back in Jan. and the recent 200 billion lending program came when the market is about to break new lows.  Basically, it feels that there must be a chartist out there working for the Fed to try to kill the bears in a timely fashion.     Oh yes, we forgot that this is an election year too.   The last thing Fed or the government wants is a financial market in total disarray going into the election.     This may sound like a conspiracy theory but you just have to admit the impeccable timing of both Fed's announcement the last two months.

Now that we know Fed can and will rescue the financial market, is there anything they can do about this inflation or the recession we are facing?   Absolutely nothing we think.    Both the inflation and recession are part of the economic cycle and it just takes time to get through them.    However, now that the Fed has signaled their intention with the financial market, the focus will be on recession and inflation going forward.    This is why we think the volatility of the market lately is the result of crosswind between Fed and economic events.    To sum it up, people are buying this market because of the endless bailout attempts from Fed while people are also selling at the same time because of the poor economic indicator which points to both a recessionary and inflationary environment.

With DJIM, we'd keep monitoring any ongoing events while keeping score of which sectors are getting bid up and which sectors are getting sold during this volatility.     Looking at today, Oil , Agri/Chem, Steel and base metal were all getting bid up aggressively.  

Just to highlight some of our favourite buy on dips play here, we like Oil stuff such as EOG BZP HES, Agri/Chem POT MOS CF, MTL CLF X STLD from the steel sector.  

On the short side, we still like the idea of shorting tech, shippers and solars on strengh only when fading the move.

Going into the trading day, the focus will rest solely on CPI and inflation.  The market seemed to have a memory lapse going into it.

A welcomed pullback...

We are glad that the indices pulled back 'some'.   It definitely takes some heat away off the overextended rally we've wanted to avoid.    Oracle's earning tonight isn't too inspiring and coupled with the always potential negative economic reports, we may see some further pullback.  This is all good news in the grand scheme of things.   One thing we may simply see Thursday is a disconnect between the DJIA and NASD off ORCL, if ECO data doesn't hurt the whole market.      The reason we keep saying this 'good' is that the further away we are from 12700 Dow and 1380 SPX, the less pressure it is to buy on the dip.     Market is actually in an interesting juncture here because we think it would take a lot of negative headlines to push this market below last week's low, which is still 700 points away for the Dow and 65 points away for the SPX.     That is a lot of ground to cover which means the chance of it happening within the next little while is slim unless something dramatic happens.  Oracle is not dramatic.

The thesis of DJIM here, is to buy on weakness while trimming some off on strength.    Unfortunately, the trouble we are having lately when it comes to work this thesis out is the fact MOST if not all of our favourite plays just refuse to come down this week.    If you look at today, and from the watchlist which we posted over the weekend, over three quarter of the plays still ended up green!   Takeaway the banks, which is something you can't play every day and the list is looking even better.   This is actually in fact scary because you can't imagine what can possibly happen to these plays if we are up triple digits.

What can we do?   Basically, not having any positions in your account while watching some of these plays like X, CLF, EOG, BZP, RIMM, AAPL... rocketing away in a down day is simply, unsettling.    So, at any time, we'd at least carry 100 or 200 shares of each just in case we have a type of day like today.     Honestly, without looking at the final box score, we really couldn't tell if we had a bad day simply by looking at our primary watchlist.

To review some action here...

Oil, today's surge in crude price not only broke the short term down trend, but it feels it has legs to challenge its recent high.    This is shown in pretty much all of our oil plays here.     We like EOG, BZP and HES the most as they are pure play here.    BZP also has a fresh breakout and notched a new closing high, the technical looks very good on that one.    RIG is another one we are now watching in addition to the above ones.

Steel,  this is the group which we are currently in a love/hate relationship.   We love it because it is the absolutely best performing group out there.    We hate it because we simply don't own enough of their shares and there has been literally no dip opportunity to add in the past few days.     This is really a pity because the higher it goes without any pullback, the more likelihood we wouldn't buy on its first dip.    In the group, we like X, CLF and STLD the best but just about every other name is also kicking in the sector.  This is the one sec you've noticed we've stuck with as the commoditity crunch came last week and our most mentioned X is becoming a darling with CNBC talking heads and last night it was Cramer pet rock.  Hopefully that doesnt ruin the group.

Agri/Chem,  as early as this Monday, we even had the idea of shorting this group as the technical picture just looked downright awful for the group.   However, one pre-announcement from MON changed all that.    The sentiment is again that this whole group will crush the number and guide higher.    We'd be very aggressive in buying any dips in this group including MON MOS CF and POT.    However, as most of you have noticed, there really isn't any dips offered in this group in the past couple of days so in a way we are kind of hoping market pulls back some again tomorrow.

Shippers, this is another area which we are taking some interest lately as the prior downtrend seemed to be over.    We aren't being aggressive in buying up the strengh last couple of days but we are rather taking opportunities to add when they get sold off along side the market.    We like DRYS the most but we also have EXM TBSI on the watchlist.  GNK another we may consider that's been here before if the sector runs and you want to purge.

Solars, this group has take on some very nice gains the last few days and we couldn't help but wonder how much further it can continue up.   The only play in the group that really interests us is FSLR so when it stops going up, we generally just wait and see what happens next with the group.

Techs,  not all technology stocks are the same and it pays to follow what is going on in the market right now.    We are staying away from the internet group in general except for an occasional intraday flip from the likes of BIDU and GOOG.    We'd be playing some RIMM/AAPL but feel the recent surge in price has been too much too fast.    RIMM's eps is only four trading days away so it's best to take it lightly at this point.

Other than the plays above, we also have ISRG, V... FDG JRCC (Coal plays), AEM (gold) that are performing well in this market.     In addition, it's getting closer that we can also give GS MS type a try on any further pullback.    Bottom line, we have some economic reports tomorrow that could give this market some cause to move and if some of our favourite plays pullback (keep our fingers crossed), we'd be there to lineup the bids.   Keep in mind, nothing is for certain in this market so we'd keep our sizes relatively small and spread out the purchase just to be conservative.   Lots of names in bold here, but that's simply because things are working off the list.

Primary Watchlist

Snapshot of platforms primary trade list at close Friday.

AAPL          153.29      +1.68             +1.11              30,527,900  
AEM           70.44       +2.42             +3.56              2,151,700   
AKS           61.11       +0.91             +1.51              2,762,400   
BIDU          293.60      +6.96             +2.43              7,999,900   
BZP           19.02       -1.46             -7.13              1,626,600   
CF            123.21      +8.66             +7.56              3,985,300   
CLB           129.00      +1.85             +1.45              202,200     
CLF           137.33      +4.59             +3.46              1,529,600   
CLHB          63.31       +1.31             +2.11              330,400     
CMP           68.00       +3.95             +6.17              1,402,000   
CSX           56.90       -1.76             -3.00              5,374,600   
DRYS          66.25       +2.15             +3.35              3,494,500   
EOG           124.32      +2.88             +2.37              1,928,000   
FDG           57.70       +1.70             +3.04              2,796,400   
FLS           110.79      +1.37             +1.25              1,075,900   
FSLR          278.70      +27.10            +10.77             12,014,000  
FMCN           40.31     +1.56                                      3, 496,100

GLD           90.27       +0.85             +0.95              7,228,200   
GS            176.00      -0.53             -0.30              8,500,200   
GU            15.45       +0.46             +3.07              1,879,900   
ISRG          336.40      -0.59             -0.17              828,400     
IWM           71.43       +0.28             +0.39              61,536,000  
JLL           82.92       -1.54             -1.82              424,800     
JRCC          19.57       +0.34             +1.77              1,222,600   
JST           33.00       +3.00             +10.00             311,500     
LNN           110.64      +0.93             +0.84              534,500     
MA            228.05      -3.20             -1.38              1,952,500   
MELI          42.75       +3.11             +7.85              2,068,700   
MON           119.01      +1.22             +1.04              7,330,400   
MOS           115.70      +11.18            +10.70             14,330,800  
MTL           133.43      +3.42             +2.63              900,300     
POT           171.12      +3.45             +2.06              9,341,800   
RIG           144.15      +3.77             +2.69              7,897,100   
RIMM          120.12      -2.46             -2.01              24,431,500  
SPWR          90.40       +8.39             +10.23             6,129,800   
SPY           137.04      0.00              +0.00              204,473,000 
STLD          35.95       +1.65             +4.81              5,689,300   
SWC           17.12       +0.81             +4.95              2,360,500   
TBSI          33.35       +0.07             +0.21              429,400     
V             64.12       -1.38             -2.11              9,099,000   
WLT           69.66       +0.58             +0.84              3,094,800   
X             140.62      +2.71             +1.96              5,645,600   

Solid..

Anyway, you look at it....The trading day was solid and it doesn't include a disclaimer as in little volume!.  We've been alluding to the fact volume is and will deteriorate heading into the summer and so we can't put much emphasis into the volume day to day now.    In other words, a +130, +42, +15 is a nice rally, nothing less!.   Last week as the indices declined, we headlined, "Not worried" and heading into this weeks trading..."In other words, we're not really worried about the markets performance/ declines last week, we think this is all the normal course after a significant breakout".    Today's performance did nothing to squelch that belief with the IWM/RUT back at resistance with the potential to create a significant breakout.  The SPX back at the psychological mark of 1400+ is where we want to be while the NDX leads the market.  At these closing levels on the IWM NDX is where you want to see volume kick up to create a talked about breakout.     If we don't get the volume breakout the Bears will do their best to diminish the move.   Considering the way we've been grinding up, we just may continue to do so even on a breakout.  lol.  A slow burial for the Bears is just fine.  Maybe a few put a gun to their heads already as FDX, MBIA stories rebounded.

Nothing extraordinary to add today as all the recent alerted new plays continued to make new highs.  We are speaking of the SOHU ANR, SNHY, MVL, and even the BZP which we nudged a few times last week.    In the meantime if this isn't enough points pocketed, we have other tradeable opportunities stepping up as in RIMM and ENER.    As we said yesterday RIMM is long term again in our view.    It wasn't just the intro of the Bold device, it's the RIMM plan at analysts day that sparked a lot of interest.      If you were around AH's, you may have caught FLR with us for what is already a nice trade.   Management raised guidance to 6.25-6.55 from 5.10-5.50 on strength from all segments.  You don't have be a genius to understand this headline.     One sector though was priming up (Shipping plays) as shipping rate noise and as to why they are this high hit a few publications like FT.    Wow, what a shocker, we've only been writing about this scenario since DRYS was in the high 50's in March-April. 

Oh yeah, doesn't it feel like the sleeping giants are about to roar once again! .  Maybe its just withdrawal we are feeling from the Chemicals-Ag, steels, but with $CRX keeping its head up...who knows, we could be playing hard again very soon.

The premise behind DJIM has always been based on earnings and even in what is the worst of eco times supposedly, we are full of plays riding this methodology.