USD should rally because of the EDB LTRO-funding but that wouldn't be good for the market. Two opposite forces and very confusing. Liquidity seems to be the stronger force right now.

A few bugs though:

I could not open it in Explorer, just in Chrome. In Chrome I was only able to open the first headlines until RUT 60. The audio works but not the graphs. I would also suggest a smaller table of contents on the left to focus on the graphs instead.

Overall a great improvement. 

Apple reached USD 400 with full steam. But after the top at USD 405 the stock went all the way down to 353 until it got new energy.

It seems that the ratio of stocks in S&P 500 trading over MA200 is getting a bit overbought. The ratio is just 69% yet so it can easily move higher. But occurrences when the SPXA200R closes over the upper Bollingerband has the last year ended with at least small set backs. Similar logic as with VIX, I presume.

Agree again but in the major sell offs people seems to jump into gold just to get burned when all margin calls forces funds and people to also sell gold.

Another big theme is that funds are starting to buy corporate bonds instead/or as a supplement to sovereign bonds. That was unthinkable just a few years ago. The default risk on, for example Russia is 17% coming 5 years. The same risk for Microsoft in the CDS market is 4,3%. That's lower than US with 4,5% probability right now. China has 12% probability. 

I agree that SSEC is important. It seems to be 3-6 month before the rest of the market. Its strange that the index is not going up when the government is signalling more support to the economy and at least three different state owned funds recently have declared that they have started to buy in the stock market. Seems to be a big deleveraging going on in China, a pre taste of what may happen in the Western World. I suppose copper will tell when its time to get out of the general market.

Friends in the agricultural business are amazed about the price difference between corn and milk. Actually nobody follows this if your not a geek because you cannot trade milk (outside the shop). But since the start of november corn has broken down at the same time as it is a lot of worry about too much rain in Australia (black line, sugar green line). Everyone seems to believe that this is because of the financial crisis but in that case also the price of milk should go down. 

The main difference may be that the funds cannot speculate in milk. Its impossible to store - just as butter or dry powder but just for some weeks. According to the latest COT data a general trend seems to be diminishing open balances. Maybe the weakness in the commodity sectors just are attributable to the funds taking down the balances/risk before the year end? If that's the case, commodities may be the big theme in the spring.

Very nice indeed. It seems that a close below the lower BB often gives a test of the upper band and thats a really big move. (Would be interesting to se some statistics on that).

I thinks its time for the cavalry to come back again. Last time was November 28 with the coordinated central bank intervention. Fed doesn't like a higher USD and the European leaders seems to believe that a strong euro is good for them (fools). Right now the Asian CBs are selling euro to buy own currencies instead, but some phone calls from Fed can make a big difference. Also IMFs Lagarde says that EU soon needs multinational coordinated cooperation to solve the crisis. It's a cry for help.

and a possibly leak would be devastating for the moral in EU.

Euro-money is 92% electronic money. Coins and notes are not any big problem in a break up. More interesting that ICAP PLC, which operates the biggest system for enabling trades between banks, yesterday said that it is preparing electronic-trading systems for a possible exit by Greece, introducing the New Drachma. Good to do some practice before a major break up...

ECRI goes on a buy signal in MACD (chart 1).

Wasnt it for Europe, we would probably have a X-mas rally. Looking at M2, which I believe is an important factor in the calculation of the black box ECRI, ECRI has more room on the upside. M2 is leading ECRI with 9 months, probably with the assumption that growing money supply creates GDP growth with that time lag. (Chart 2)

The daily correlation between EUR/USD and S&P 500 has decreased from 80 to +50, as the worries increases about Euroland but the stock market refuses to go down.

A potential Head and Shoulder pattern developed in DAX. Neckline coincides with MA50.

Max Pain for QQQ is 57 - and QQQ trades at 57,40. Will it be a slow week?

Do anyone know Current Max Pain?

Just looking at the graph M2 is leading ECRI. My personal view, for what its worth, is that growth will slow below 0 again during Q1 and/or Q2 and we will have a QE3. With the high volatility in the ECRI-index, ECRI can always say that they have been right, whatever the outcome will be. It's a black box.

Playing around with the indexes I found a very high correlation between M2 (US money supply year over year index) and ECRI. M2 seems to be a good leading indicator for ECRI.

Growing M2 may also be a good reason for the stock market to go up - its still plenty of cheap money out there

with ECRI vs. S&P 500

This is a replay to a debate a week ago about ECRI between lessarda, rp et al - but I had problem with the upload of graphs then.

The first one shows ECRI together with US GDP and it seems that ECRI is quite often right about the trend in the GDP. One obvious reason is of course that ECRI is published every week but GDP one time in a quarter (with two revisions).

The second graph shows ECRI together with S&P 500 and it seems that ECRI also here has a pretty good ability to show the coming trend for S&P 500. Right now the reading is very negative for the GDP and S&P 500.

However, I wouldn't trade on ECRI as it is a black box. It uses probably S&P 500 itself as a leading indicator together with different PMIs, CPI, credit and velocity of money. I prefer to go directly to these parameters instead of making trust into a black box. 

Its obvious that Harper is more relevant to S&P 500 than Baltic Dry

On Harpers site you can download 3 years history and elaborate in the different sizes of vessels. Unfortunately I cannot find older numbers for Harpers.

thanks for the posts sethbru and rp, very interesting