Morning Breath June 25

Good morning. Happy Monday. Hope you had a nice weekend.

The Asian/Pacific markets closed mostly down. China and South Korea dropped more than 1%. Europe is currently down across the board. Greece is down almost 5%, Austria 3% and Belgium, France, Germany, Stockholm, Switzerland and the Czech Republic more than 1%. Futures here in the States point towards a big gap down for the cash market.
The dollar is up. Oil is down, copper flat. Gold and silver are down.
There isn’t much news out this morning, and there isn’t much (just New Home Sales) on the calendar here in the US.
There’s an EU summit this week, but expectations are quickly dropping anything meaningful will be done. It was origianally believed decisions would be made regarding Greece, who was hoping to ease the conditions of its bailout.
Spain has officially requested a $125 billion bailout from the 17-member EU to recapitalize its banks. Some believe this is just the beginning, that they’ll need a full bailout at a later date.
RIMM is considering spliting itself in two.
BMY and PFE are down before the open. Their blood clot preventer failed to win approval from US health regulators.
The market absorbed two major events last week, first the Greek election, then the FOMC meeting. Then prices fell hard on Thursday in one of the worst days in of the year. A bounce Friday will prove to be short lived because all the gains will be given back at today’s open. For the week, the indexes formed semi ugly candles.
One by one the indexes broke above their 5-week basis but in all cases, dropped below resistance last Thursday, and as of today’s open, they’ll still be below the previous resistance levels. The breakouts will either be of the false variety (lure everyone in and then smack it down) or last Thursday and today’s open will prove to be ordinary corrections within a newly formed uptrend.
There are lots of questions out there, lots of uncertainty. From a trading standpoint, we need to be patient. During the S&P’s 100 point bounce, we had a nice round of trades, but since last Tuesday, we’ve adobted a defensive posture and played good defense. That’s how swing trading works. You get a nice round of breakouts that lasts a few weeks (or longer), then you shift to protect profits and wait for the charts to reset. The fact that the near term is unclear is fine with me because I don’t have any very good set ups to trade anyways.www.leavittbrothers.com