Stocks spring forward finishing an extremely volatile week on an up note. If the % changes in the last 3 days were added together & assuming they were in the same direction, it would have been a 7% change or almost 1000 points in the Dow. Today the Dow was up 261, advancers ahead of decliners nearly 3-1 & NAZ up 48. That followed an even larger decline yesterday & an even bigger gain on Tues. Can you spell volatility? The VIX fell 3.22 to 26.62, still a very high reading. This was also a quadruple witching day, adding extra volatility to the markets. Today, all you had to do to find winners was throw darts. Banks led the charge forward. REITs continued to recover from very depressed levels & even junk bond funds had an up day (from record low levels offering extremely high yields). MLPs, however, slipped a little. Maybe the pullback in energy prices unnerved some investors. Commodities had a wild ride, mostly in reverse ending their worst week in half a century. Gold in just a couple days fell to 920. Oil rallied a little today ending over 101, considered a bullish sign for bullish traders.
The Conference Board said its index of leading economic indicators fell in Feb for the 5th consecutive month. The index dipped 0.3% to 135.0 in Feb after a 0.4% decline in Jan. CIT Group (CIT), down 2.01 to 9.63, said it's tapping into its $7.3B credit lines to repay debt and finance its commercial lending business because it cannot obtain financing from other sources.
Tomorrow will be a day of rest in the US, but overseas markets should generally be open.
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