Friday Outlook: Watching Paint Dry

Sticking with this week’s theme, bulls have a lot on the line with claims of a bottom in place and the end-of-quarter at hand.

No one portfolio manager wants to report losses for the first quarter since bonuses are on the line [well, that’s not gonna happen except for a lucky few] and they also need to provide confidence for their investors. So, painting the tape is a common occurrence, especially at times like these.

Volume is still comparatively light but breadth is poor.
















































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Comments

[farukh Khan]

Tape paiters need an up day today! :-)

[fjd10595]

In the broad market, I think what you are looking at is an intermediate term uptrend as we hover around our 50 day MA, but absolutely we still have a LT downtrend in stocks. I don't see how stocks could be higher one year out (give or take), since the consumer is no where to be found (stores are empty), home prices are falling, and the consumer is 70% of our GDP (itself a national disgrace).

[nmau]

Seems that the concensus is to be bearish. Time to look forward. Here, in MA, it is difficult to find parking at the malls on weekends.

[hugoh]

Here in suburban Georgia local sales tax revenues for the prior month were down 31%.

As to the point about portfolio managers reporting losses for the quarter, it might be better to take as much of that now as is reasonable to make next quarter's returns look better.

We're in a 50/50 situation for today.

[Steven Towns]

Couldn't agree more David. In fact, we saw some serious window dressing in Japan and across Asia today. Very appropriate for Japan given its fiscal year-end on Monday. A/D was very strong and volume recovered on a jump in foreign net-buying, including a reported influx of long oil money. Still, there was quite a large intra-day spread. Will be interesting to see what happens from Tuesday.

[Vikram]

I think instead of window dressing, we are seeing window breaking (as termed by Art Cashin on CNBC). Hedge funds are massively short the market and want their shorts to go back further before the quarter end. The rumors about LEH/ML seem to strengthen the thesis, that there are some significant money trying to get the some high profile under performing stocks to go down further.

So the securities under pressure in the second half of this week might see more pressure on Monday and then rally into the rest of the week as the hedgies rush to reduce their short exposure.

After the big up day earlier this week, the market listlessly drifted down with very little conviction in any direction. This is really an odd behavior and suggests that the traditional window-dressing is being supplemented by sometime more, and newer.