Market Alert - Pre-Market

Futures vs FV: SP -5.71; DJ -29.14 NASDAQ -7.22

Futures are off after the stock indices pushed higher Friday in its half day session. A lot of upside, a bit of downside, but futures are coming back off their early lows. Will the resilience continue? Nothing but a few points downside to start the week says otherwise. Oh, and perhaps things are getting a big farther overbought after RUTX up 15 straight days and almost 1%/day over its 200 day MA (okay, the math is not perfect but the point is there).

Of course Black Friday is the main headline on Cyber Monday. It is said more shopped but bought less. AMZN and WMT reported increased mobile traffic with WMT saying 70% of its "event traffic" was from mobile. Not sure what either of that means. So they are buying from their phones versus computers? Makes sense as most of the younger crowd uses phones almost exclusively. 'Event traffic?' Does that mean final sales? Sadly, legal-eeze has hit retail sales reporting.

Oil: All weekend the talk was the death of the potential OPEC production limit deal. An OPEC production deal in jeopardy? Shocking!.

Then this morning someone from Iraq said he was 'optimistic' a deal could be reached as it would 'cooperate' in reaching a deal. Suddenly all is well and oil is back up. Brilliant! A news-starved, hopeful market seizes on the optimistic cooperation and voila, oil is up.

Other news:

Castro is dead. Another of the murderous tyrants dies. Unlike some who seem to have forgotten, or perhaps never learned, I won't pen nonsense such as 'he had a great impact on the Cuban people' as one commentator said, not in a negative way, but as if his impact was positive. He sure did have an impact! He slaughtered, tortured, abused, and impoverished millions of Cubans.

More Trump stuff. Recounts, voting fraud claims, in-fighting regarding Secretary of State nominations, etc. The usual.


OTHER MARKETS
Bonds: 2.325% vs 2.36%. Bonds rallying back . . . some.

EUR/USD: 1.0587 vs 1.0596

USD/JPY: 112.63 vs 113.14. Dollar fading some of the gains against the yen.

Oil: 46.64, +0.58

Gold: 119.20, +9.20


Black Friday was not the kind of traffic the bricks and mortars wanted, some commenting consumers were looking for big deals and not getting them so they did not buy. Looks as if a game of chicken is brewing in the holiday shopping season. That suggests the consumer is not quite as strong as claimed. Oh yes, yes, not as bad as in 2008 and 2009, but not anywhere near the 1980's in that recovery and the 1990's in that continued expansion from the 1980's. Those decades make this look like little leaguers against professionals.

So, futures are starting lower but not on the lows of the session, not at all. If you look at a morning SPY chart you can see a spike just before 5:00ET. That is when the Iraq minister said Iraq would 'cooperate' and he was thus 'optimistic.'

We will see what kind of pullback this brings in some stocks that started higher but on a light volume, shortened end of last week. Also watching NVDA, FCX, AKS, MAN, LRCX, etc. to see if some gain needs to be taken. They are off just a bit pre-market.


Jon Johnson, Chief Market Strategist
InvestmentHouse.com
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