Gold, S&P, EUR/USD, Dollar futures

Interesting night so far, we had spot gold bidding hard then give it all back as well as Spoos bidding only to give it all right back. The S&Ps touched 1288.50 on a rather odd volume spike of 6k contracts around 9:30 eastern only to trap traders long as they traded back to 1282.75 before finding 1283 support. The EUR USD cross saw bidding most of the evening before falling off in conjunction with equity markets.

The move in equities tonight in my opinion is clearly a reflection of traders sentiment over China's PMI which showed slowing growth and increased inflation with hints at a possible rate hike. I think we saw

So far today everything made sense. We had rioting and protests in the streets of Cairo (pictured) as well as US equity markets shooting up nearly .60%! The world of bizzzaro Jerry is upon us, it seems nothing can stop our markets from disregarding anything and everything in their path good or bad.

The market zombie's around where she goes nobody knows but the guy whomever knows how large the NY fed trading account is...

Anyway you can see from the chart to the left the the nasdaq chugged higher all morning off 2255 after INTC pulled a card out of the amateur's play book...

 "Intel lowered margin guidance, raises revenue outlook, due to a chipset error. Intel expects a chipset design error with its Cougar Point series to reduce Q1 revenue by $300M and cost $700M to repair and replace the affected materials. Intel now expects Q1 revenue to be $11.7B, plus or minus $400M, compared to the previous expectation of $11.5B, plus or minus $400M."

The nasdaq also chugged higher off the 2260 after the NQ_F opened last night without even flinching.... If we test 1300 again this week on the SPOOZ i will be simply amazed at our markets "strength and perseverance in the face of uncertainty".. sarcasm.

Serenity now!


 

On the 5 min chart that is..

/GC 5 min

Via @thecmz @thekillir

via @optionmonster @thecmz

ANR and MEE signed a definitive agreement under which Alpha will acquire all outstanding shares of Massey common stock... pretty sweet deal, for a Saturday afternoon... Congrats to call holders... Our service The Buro News Wire alerted subscribers to MEE takeover chatter at 3:41 friday afternoon... Check out the service at BuroAlerts.net 

Under the terms of the agreement, Massey stockholders will receive, at the closing, 1.025 shares of Alpha common stock and $10.00 in cash for each share of Massey common stock. Based on the closing share price of Alpha common stock as of January 28, 2011, the agreement placed a value of $69.33 per share of Massey common stock. 

 

SPOOS 1 min

A brief Summary the last 10 hours of today and back to Tuesday night...
9 hours ago:
10 hours ago: 
10 hours ago: 
and from Tuesday night 
I guess my Tuesday night thoughts were not to far off.. the Dollar hanging around support, Gold seemingly over sold though equities not budging... Today those assets moved...The market still feels heavy and the day is still young... 

Just heard on this live feed "Egypt state security entering building media is housed streaming live feeds"

Sunset prayer time currently.. check these images out..

via @optionmonster @thecmz

AAPL 1 min SIKE!

gold futures 1 min Keep an eye on this formation for a failure to the upside or a continuation to the downside.. Failures of descending triangles are more violent to the upside...fyi

GOLD 1 min

Continues selling off AMZN's heels... i am keeping this quick tonight.. look for 1298.75 to be the upside line in the sand with 1291 on the downside as support. Gold again is weak tonight 9 more points at one point trading below 1310, currently 1310.70.
ES_F chart below

Facebook's doing it, now linkedin ...... Is this the beginning of a new surge in disruptive technologies resulting in IPO's left and right.... Maybe the time is right? Maybe not...

Check the chart posted by Felix Salmon of US equity listings and their steep decline post 1997. Pretty wild right? Consolidation within all sectors has surely contributed to the decline in public listings, as well as decreased margins of conducting business within the United States.... Do not get me started...

(TechCrunch writes) "Out of the 5 percent stockholders, the company’s largest shareholder is LinkedIn’s founder and chairman Reid Hoffman and his wife Michelle Yee, owning 19 million shares or 21.4 percent of the company. He’s followed by Sequoia Capital (16.8 million shares or 18.9 percent), Greylock Partners (14 million shares or 15.8 percent) and Bessemer Venture Partners (4.6 million shares or 5.1 percent).

Seqouia was LinkedIn’s earliest investor in 2003, followed by Greylock in 2004. Bessemer participated in LinkedIn’s three later rounds in 2007 and 2008."

"dont fire until you see the whites of their eyes"


In regards to Egypt you can now see how a seemingly modern government in a modern society with modern technology such as internet, electricity etc can simply be shut off by the government to aid in the silencing of protestors yelling across the sea's. A line from ZeroHedge's post on Egypt's tensions summed up what would happen if this were to take place in the U"

"merely a shutdown of Facebook and Twitter (and possibly cable) and 300 million well-armed American will promptly go apeshit."

 Yes Zero is right. SWHTF in the US if China dumps our treasury's and 70% of states go belly up slashing budgets including police spending, hell chicago is operating every day 2300 officers short of full operating force. Think about the US as a whole.. Can local, state and federal governments handle massive political unrest? I doubt it. Communication is so fast in our current society governments may have no choice but to simple turn off data and voice networks to prevent the spread of instability.

Anyway, gold lost its pants again
today, they are about halfway around golds ass, ala Ice Cube in Friday. Perhaps tomorrow and tonight

Interesting development in biopharm/tech land... ARNA is down quite a bit after hours on release of some not so hot FDA news..

"Arena has receives a request from the FDA to submit protocols for the lorcaserin New Drug Application, prior to initiating certain studies, and expects to provide Arena with its comments and recommendations within approximately one month of each protocol submission. In December 2010, Arena reported on its discussions with the FDA at the end-of-review meeting including Arena and Eisai's plans to address the lorcaserin Complete Response Letter and the expectation to resubmit the NDA to the FDA by the end of 2011. Arena is continuing its discussions with the FDA to finalize protocols for activities that are designed to address the issues raised by the FDA or that otherwise are related to the assessment of the benefit-risk profile of lorcaserin. Arena continues to believe that it can resubmit the lorcaserin NDA by the end of 2011. "

AMZN 1 min

Q4 EPS 91c vs. consensus 88c
Q4 revenue $12.95B vs. consensus $12.98B

That revenue number came in a bit light.. ALA NFLX style.. though NFLX went straight up...

Amazon.com Q1 revenue $9.1B-$9.9B vs. consensus $9.30B

Just as we await the breach of 1300 in the S&P futures chew on this bit of information if you have not yet..

Interesting happening in the southern IL region if you are into grains, corn etc etc trading might be work taking a look at...... It appears the southern region of IL has been so hard hit with draught they are declaring the counties an agricultural disaster area based on damaged crops...

(WFIE writes) "This declaration will provide much needed assistance to producers in southern and eastern Illinois that experienced significant losses, particularly with forage crops, due to drought late last summer and fall," Agriculture Director Tom Jennings said.

The 16 counties included in the disaster declaration are Alexander, Edwards, Franklin, Gallatin, Hamilton, Hardin, Jackson, Johnson, Massac, Pope, Pulaski, Saline, Union, Wayne, White and Williamson. The adjoining counties eligible for aid are Clay, Jefferson, Marion, Perry, Randolph, Richland and Wabash.

Gold, S&Ps, AIG, Dollar Today has been quite the day for Gold on the downside, off over 20 points all while the market sits on highs. If gold were not puking on itself the S&Ps would be clear over 1300 in my opinion. The dollar is still fighting with support levels and refusing to give up the 78ish area without a proven long fight.  Spot gold broke the 1330 level with ease, if 1310 goes surely 1300 will be the next stop in short notice.. Perhaps a larger

Much hunch was correct....

update:"Sheen had a 'briefcase full of cocaine 'delivered to his home & was using large amounts of the drug during the 36-hour bender" tmz.... lol


TMZ  "Neighbors tell TMZ Charlie threw some sort of party last night. They heard women inside Charlie's house singing Red Hot Chili Peppers songs throughout the evening. The party went on -- loudly -- well into the wee hours."

via @optionmonster

NetFlix 1 min ...

GC_F, ES_F, EURUSD, DX_F As you can see from the cart above (upper right) we have an up market leading into FOMC, there are new members at the FOMC table this go around. We should expect some push back in Bernanke's low rates policy, which has been in place for over 2 years now. Could this push back be big enough for him to marginally raise rates? I doubt it but what is clear is they want the S&P futures at 1300 at all costs. notice we have euro weakness and marginal dollar strength over the 78 level which is the line in the sand. Gold is down but up considerably from this mornings session.  Volume is marginal as well, though i am not reading to far into todays volume ahead of the FOMC because it is usually all bidding and taking offers. standard pre FOMC trading.  A few scenarios can play out..

Via @thecmz @thekillir

via OptionMonster

Well there you have it, another SOTU down with nothing new said or heard in the 1.3 hours of the speech. Most of what Obama covered was already leaked to the press; rails, clean energy more regulation etc. I feel like the poking fun at Repubs and the placing of Libs on a pedestal is not the best way to draw laughs in the chamber. 

ES_F 1 min

Notice the pop when Obama started talking.. pushing highs.. up to 1290.... melt melt melt up up and away! Highs are 1296.25 for the year in the emini's...

The founder of Jimmy John's Sandwich shop, Jimmy John Liautaud is fairly pissed about the personal and corporate tax hike in IL this year. In fact he is so pissed he is moving his family to Florida and has yet to decide whether or not to move the company's corporate headquarters out of Champaign IL to a more business friendly corner of the country.

The company was founded in IL and has been headquartered there since the late 80's. The headquarters employes around 100 full time and 100 part time workers.

Hell, i am with Mr. Liautaud, Illinois is a complete joke and the state is not fixing problems they are simply charging more to live within the state plugging holes in the budget which they simply are not going to even try to fix. They are not trying to fix the system primarily because the system is so completely screwed up it will be next to impossible to fix without bankrupting the state. Do it i say!!! They allow hand guns in the home in Cook Co. now, let the civil unrest begin.

(news-gazette writes) Jimmy John Liautaud told The News-Gazette on Tuesday that he is angry about the moves, which boosted the individual income tax from 3 percent to 5 percent and the corporate income tax from 7.3 percent to 9.5 percent.

"All they do is stick it to us," he said, adding that the Legislature and governor

GC_F, Euro/Usd/ES_F/DX_F

Well all know our fearless leader will be addressing the nation tonight, you can watch it here if you do not have a TV available and are stuck on your computer. Most of these speeches are nothing but fluff and really do nothing for anyone BUT the companies which are in the sectors of business the president mentions. We all know he is going to speak about clean energy and energy prices as well as the current stock market rally.

CLNE was a stock today which got a push higher because of rumors Obama would speak about clean energy during his speech, thus a rumor went around; now pro

ven fact T. Boone Pickens is going to be on Squawk box tomorrow AM discussing the business.
As for the correlations you can see the EURO/USD is closely connected to the chart of gold. though

Via @optionmonster

ES_F 1 min prior to drop.. notice low volume rise

We as traders sit here all damn day waiting for something remotely interesting to happen, like a sell off or hell even a break into to new territory to the upside. Either or would be great, but backfilling and trading across levels which have been in the cards for weeks presents nothing but chop.

Today is a perfect example, we had some moderately shitty housing numbers come out which caused the market to nose dive below 1280 only to be caught with a baseball glove at 1278.75ish. The market retraced 80% of the morning's down move in one solid trend on decreasing volume.

You can notice this trend in the chart above, notice the volume and the green candles. A market which

via @optionmonster

ES_F 15 min

I'll admit i have been slacking in the late night update category though lets be honest what has changed besides Regis Philbin leaving day time TV and Oprah launching her own network? Exactly, nothing new.... this market backfills and pushes highs and back fills and pushes highs dragging momentum and beta stocks along for the sloppy sluggish ride.

Tonight we have quite a few assets perched on levels which garner a lot of traders attention including; gold, dollar, euro and equity futures.

As for gold the 1330 level was briefly breached this evening before she was pushed back above, though still the asset's short term fate is hanging by a thread. US dollar futures are on daily resistance turned support of 77.50 all while the

Gold Futures Daily

The above chart you can draw many different conclusions from. The number one conclusion i draw from this chart is support @ the 1333-1330 levels. What makes this level worth watching is the prior nearly straight up trend from August until mid October leads up through this level. This level has been tested nearly 5 times the past 3 months only to result in a bounce up to near all time gold highs. The all time Gold was actually put in after a test of support, this high is 1432.50.

Will we see a bounce like we have seen in the past due to increasing dollar weakness and euro

Google weekly chart.. notice volume and trend divergence

The chart above is a weekly chart dating back to March of 2009. The reason i picked this chart/time frame is because of the large ascending triangle formed over the past 1.5 years. Clearly the highest print is 642.96, on this time frame, though after earnings were release i did see prints up at 653 on multiple data sources though have yet to confirm if the prints were real.

To be honest i do not really care about moving averages when looking at this chart because the volume and price action tells the story.. we have declining volume and a rising trend, with higher volume on

NFLX Daily

This post/chart is an update to a January 6th post highlighting the 175 level as a downside line in the sand for NFLX. Today off the open we saw selling again taking NFLX down to 176.07 on moderate selling. Netflix was not unique to the sharp selling off the open; AMZN, PCLN and GOOG saw similar action though AAPL was the exact opposite, straight up off open. As you can see from the chart above, this level has been tested many times as it has been resistance turned into support in mid November 2010.

NFLX's price bounced rather quickly off lows this morning as the index's chopped around looking to find direction, that direction was up. If the index's were not at the back of beta tech, cough apple,

via @theCMZ & @theKillir

AAPL 3 day chart The trend is AAPL is by no means "shattered" though that big fat red candle put in last week is something to take note of... 325-320 is the lower line in the sand i am sure many a trader is watching. Next up is 300 if those support levels fail... What struck me as so interesting psychologically and technically speaking was the price action we saw after two of arguably the most influencing tech companies in the world blow out earnings only to not move higher but move lower on volume after a flurry of negative headlines... and during OPEX week...  GooG ex ceo Eric S. selling 355 mil shares of goog stock is not something longtime share holders want to hear a day after he announces he is stepping down from his post.... Also take into account FFIV price action...  GOOG chart below.. notice volume ... red... 600 coming up.. line in sand..

Very interesting development in the land of Google, Eric Schmidt is stepping down to become executive chairman with Larry Page taking over as CEO. Did they take a page out of the Steve Jobs play book or what? Google stock is up after hours, high print was 653, currently trading 643.

GOOGLE Q4 EPS
Google reports Q4 EPS $8.75 vs. consensus $8.09
Reports Q4 revenue ex-tac $6.37B vs. consensus $6.06B

( writes) "Schmidt, who became CEO in 2001, will assume the role of executive chairman, focusing on deals and government outreach, among other things.

Page, who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin, will take charge of day-to-day operations as CEO.

Google also reported fourth-quarter financial results, beating Wall Street's net revenue expectations.

Net revenue, excluding fees that Google paid to partner websites, was $6.37 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S, on average, were expecting net revenue of $6.06 billion."

 Per GOOG conference call ""We have touched just 1% of the capabilities that could be deployed in that realm, and I think you should expect us to continue to develop those kind of capabilities."
 

via @optionmonster