Mundane Monday

Dow Jones 9,816.49 -115.48 -1.16%
NASDAQ 2,173.90 -45.27 -2.04%
S&P 500 1,050.47 -14.41 -1.35%

Market kept hopping the fence between positive and negative for a long stretch today before bears took control. AAPL held up the bulls as long as it could before selling off after Steve Jobs' presentation of the iPhone G4. After hitting an early high of 259.15, AAPL closed at 250.94. It was probably sell-on-the-news movement, but there really is no catalyst in sight to aid the bulls, and the S&P closing below 1,060 is going to make technicians tremble if they're still long this market.

Nine of the 39 nat gas plays I follow finished positive, somewhat disappointing after a large majority of them were up most of the day. UNG finished with the biggest gain at 2.69% (32.27) and is trading at 32.50 after hours. GDP, REXX, ROSE, SWN, KWK, NFX and STR finished green.

Since Obama's clean energy speech on Thursday, 25 of the 39 natty gassers on my list are up. Most have gained 3 to 13%. Even WPRT, which was down 5.4% today, is still up 10.96% since Obama's speech.

FAZ was a winner today with a gain of 5.08% despite opening to the downside. VXX closed up 3.13% to 32.27.

GLD closed up 1.93% to 121.49 and SLV finished strong, up 4.46% to 17.81. It was mostly the inverse ETNs that had strong moves today. TZA finished up 7.82% to 8.13 on huge volume (59.3 million shares).

TLT held up fairly well at +0.77%.

DNDN took a big hit of -10.14% and closed at 36.70. A lot of traders had big profits and closed out their trades, not too different from traders and funds selling AAPL off to cover losing trades and/or margin calls. (Margin is evil, but that's just my point of view.)

GS down 2.51% to 138.68 on more Fed investigation news. C down 3.96% to 3.64 and NBG -5.6% to 2.19. IRE held on to its gain (+2.91%), but was a far cry from its intraday high when it was up more than 10%.

BP closed near its low at 36.76 (-2.44%) despite reports that it's capturing more of the leaking oil in the Gulf. SCO (+0.42%) and DTO (+0.43%) didn't move big despite BP's drop because other oil plays like Haliburton scored pretty nice today.

IMAX lost its early gains and finished down 1.3% (15.91). Just about every high-flying stock of a few months ago got knocked down for a second day in a row. BIDU lost 4.63% to 69.81. NFLX not too bad a loss, just 0.56% to 109.16. 


FXE down fractionally and UUP up a bit. Stronger dollar each day. Weaker Euro each day. It's probably by design on the part of the EU, which is crappy for the US market. In turn, more people go long the dollar. 

If the market does, indeed, fall through thin ice, there's so little support in terms of willing buyers. The outflows have been significant, and the psyche of traders and investors who left in May will take a long time to heal. Nothing's really changed in the past few weeks. Europe is still in the midst of financial rehab. US banks are going to take a hit because of their relationships with French and German banks, who in turn are going to eat some of the debts of EU laggards like Greece. 

As summer beckons, there are going to be more and more traders who drop everything and escape to their long-awaited vacations, possibly earlier than planned. It would make plenty of sense to get away from this market and its wretched addiction to debt and subsequent withdrawl symptoms. 

I entered small positions in UNG and VXX before the close. I'll probably exit within the next hour. Currently 75% cash.