US Afternoon Wrap 230409

Afternoon all,

I'll make this a quick wrap up. DJ and S&P headed down south early in the morning, but recovered from the trough strongly in the afternoon session as the market shrugged off poor home sales data and rising jobless claims, taking both indices up 0.89% and 0.99% respectively.

A snapshot of the sectors' performance are as follow:

Consumer Discretionary: +0.08%
Consumer Staples: -0.18%
Energy: +1.82%
Financials +4.50%
Industrial: +1.40%
IT: +0.44%
Materials: -0.28%
Tellecomm: -0.34%
Utilities: +0.35%

Given dismal expectations over earnings, to be honest, any earnings that hits the mark will certainly fuel some sense of optimism. Hence, late earnings news from Mariott, Microsoft and Ebay beats consensus estimates, and fuels optimism over the market, again, over the issue of bottoming out and recovery. Cnoocphillips also took the energy sector up with their earnings.

Autos went up in general by 4%, fueled by optimism in the market. However, GM went down 4% as expected.

Financials pulled market up in general for the entire session, thanks largely by diversified banks, may be a trade over the optimism for the stress test result tomorrow, which in our opinion, continues to be a bear over the aforementioned reasons in previous post.

Looking ahead, in our opinion, we remain cautious over the next session despite the continual optimism over the current market rally. We remain to believe this is a BEAR MARKET RALLY and the market is runing ahead of itself as data continual to pointing to a deterioriating economy. We remain to favour the precious metal and defensive plays.

A comment over our recommendation:

Short on Citigroup (C) proved well: +1.54%
Sell on Spdr Financials did not pay off: - 3.06%
Buy on Spdr Gold: +1.63%
Buy on Walmart: -0.20%

That's about it today.

Happy trading!

ongy out.