DJIM 48, 2009

First of all, we wish everyone just had a great thanksgiving holiday.    The past week was "supposed" to be a quiet week where the focus was supposed to be on turkey as oppose to the market.    Instead, we had this ‘little ;)’ announcement from Dubai that it's planning to delay the debt payment of its state controlled company, Dubai World.    As we know with news rocked the western world,  hopefully you didn’t react like “Tiger Woods” by panicking and fender bender-ing a fire hydrant and a tree early that morning!   Both the European and Asian market took a hefty beating and our futures pointed to a nasty ripple open for Friday as the sudden return of ‘credit risk‘ returned seemingly.   They definitely picked a right time to do this, eh?

The actual ‘leverage’ exposure, as far as the US banks is concerned, is very minimal and we think this is containable.    The fact we had a huge gap down at the open on Friday morning was inevitable due to the overseas weakness.    Also, there's also the so called "flight to safety" trade where people taking on safer investment while losing some risky ones.    For DJIM, we had one question in our mind this holiday.     Didn't anyone see this coming from Dubai?     To us, Dubai is nothing more than a glorious version of "Vegas".    With the number of projects they have going on over there, they'd better hope that they can attract more than just the rich folks.    By now, we know that most of the exposure are from the European banks and that is something reassuring to know for the U.S. market.

The biggest question right now, come Monday, is whether this Dubai news would continue to shake investors' confidence in the equity market and flee to other safe assets.    If Friday was a good indication of how things would come in the coming week, we are pretty confident things won't be bad.    The volume on Friday looks pretty good, given the fact the market only opened for half a day.    Had the market opened for the full day,  we would have some very healthy volume and turnover.    This to us, means that many folks were being pulled from their holiday and back onto their ‘blackberry’ trading desks to deal with the market.    No doubt, many folks saw this as an opportunity to buy into weakness while others would see this as a reason to park it in for the year.      For DJIM, we see this weakness as an opportunity as we don't believe U.S. market participants would be as concerned about Dubai as the European players.     On the other hand,  there's really no other alternative investments to pile your money into.   The so called "safety assets" don't really earn you much and if this Dubai debacle turns out to be nothing but a short term manageable headache, we believe the funds will flow back into the equity market.

As far as plays go, some of our latest plays behaved really well on Friday.   RINO and TRIT  even managed to tack on some respectable gains.    Other plays such as AIXG, CLF, CTRP, MELI,  GMCR... all traded as if the market was down just a couple of points.     Coming Monday,  we'll have most traders back from the holiday and we'll see how they digest the recent events.    We also have data from this Black Friday sales event which will give traders plenty of catalyst to vote their opinion.   In addition,  we have job report in the coming week,  so this will be a pivotal week for the remainder of the trading year.