Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Thursday. The S&P 500 was down .16%, today. Not exactly the follow through day we were looking for. We’ve had a couple of times here we’ve had little up-market hoping for kind of a second up-market day. It reminds me of a joke about a young trader who is told to buy the dip. And he says, “I wish they would have told me it was a seven layer dip.”
Although, we did see some buying come in today. And so, there’s a couple of things that I think are interesting about today. Number one is, retail sales came in for August at a much higher level than was expected: It was supposed to drop .8%, and actually went up .7%, so that was a good thing. The other thing I thought was positive about today was that the market came in actually pretty weak right off the bat, and then rallied throughout the rest of the day. So, some of that dip buying did come in; didn’t get it all the way to positive territory. The NASDAQ did make it the positive territory, so I think that’s okay.
Let me show you something that I think is kind of interesting, actually, and something to keep an eye on here. And so this is a chart of the S&P 500, for the past 12 months; every one of these boxes is a day. This blue line here is the 50 day moving average, so every point on this line is an average of the 50 days prior. And you can see how many times that is bounced off of this blue line. The last two times that it actually fell through this blue line, was September and October before the election last year. But a lot of people trade off of that line, and so this will be important to see: Does it hold up there, as far as that goes, and how does that end up playing out for us?
So, right now it’s holding up: It’s above that 50 day moving average. The other thing to keep in mind that I think is important, is again this is “Quadruple Witching Friday.” Four different option contracts are going to be expiring tomorrow. That always creates a lot of volatility. It also creates kind of a different environment, so you’re trying to analyze, “hey, this is what happened in the past.” Again, I think maybe next week will be a better gauge of what’s really going on as far as that goes.
And I’ll say again, I don’t think that this is a situation where things are really falling apart. There is a little bit more negative news than positive news. That’s mainly just because there’s a paucity of positive news, and I think some of that will come here as we start to work on earnings; which should be pretty spectacular, I believe, as far as that goes. So anyway, that’s what’s happening today. Look forward to talking to you tomorrow. We do have our Talk Money with Tom show tomorrow. I do my summary at the beginning, and then you can send in any questions that you have. So if you get a chance, I look forward to joining me. So thank you very much. Talk to you then.