Market Commentary: Markets In Safe Mode Waiting For Debt News

Written by Gary

Midday Market Commentary For 10-15-2013

By noon the markets in general reached new historic highs (small caps) or daily highs. Not being able to punch through the upper resistance, the averages retracted a bit dropping back into the red and are presently sliding sideways on low volume.

Charts and other technical crystal ball forecasting is useless until the US law makers get rid of investors biggest fear of US default. Investors are sitting back with trigger fingers on the buy/sell button.

Not exactly a fan of CNBC, but agree that as long as we have the ‘Taper’, the market will continue to melt upwards, baring any unforeseeable, unforeseen ‘black swans’ as Rumsfeld would say.

Tepper: “Fed Won’t Taper For A Long Time”, “Generally Speaking Market Will Go Up”

Back on May 14, when the S&P was at 1651 or 50 points lower, and when David Tepper made his first book-talking, semi-annual CNBC appearance in which he “blessed the market and awaited the manufacturing renaissance“, he made two points about the taper.

. . . it’s bullish no matter what, namely its removal would mean the economy is improving (we now know it isn’t thanks to the Fed and Q4 GDP estimates which are rapidly sliding to 2% or lower), while a taper staying put would mean the Fed would continue pumping stocks higher artificially indefinitely.

Today, he did a repeat appearance, in which in addition to the usual market pumping rhetoric, everyone was most interested in how he would spin the recent stunner by the Fed which effectively made the taper a 2014 event.

His take: “The Fed won’t taper for a long time… So that’s definitely sort of going to be a push-up to markets.“

Couldn’t have said it better: but to paraphrase – Taper is bullish no matter what; No Taper is bullish-er.

The DOW at 12:00 is at 152549 down 41 or -0.28%.

The SP500 is at 1707 down 3 or -0.20%.

SPY is at 170.59 down 0.37 or -0.22%.

The $RUT is at 1084 down 7 or -0.61%.

NASDAQ is at 3809 down 6 or -0.16%.

NASDAQ 100 is at 3259 up 4 or 0.11%.

The longer trend is up, the past months trend is mixed, the past 5 sessions have been positive and the current bias is positive.

How Oil Really Gets Priced

WTI oil is trading between 102.45 and 101.25 today. The session bias is sideways and is currently trading down at 101.87.

Brent Crude is trading between 110.48 and 708.87 today. The session bias is sideways and is currently trading down at 109.73.

Gold rose from 1251.17 earlier to 1277.37 and is currently trading down at 1271.10.

Here’s why copper has lost its indicator role

Dr. Copper is at 3.297 rising from 3.281 earlier.

The US dollar is trading between 80.33 and 80.79 and is currently trading up at 80.69, the bias is currently sideways.

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Written by Gary