Will We Hold It Wednesday – S&P 2,000 Edition

2,000.02 – We did it!!!

Unfortunately, we can’t afford to pop the champagne because the 0.03 we spend on it would put us back under – so we’ll watch and we’ll wait another day before celebrating a milestone we’ve been expecting since last week (see “Will Jackson Hole Give Us S&P 2,000?“) and we went with that TNA trade we discussed in yesterday’s post to cover the expected bull run. 

We also picked up long plays on BAC and DBA in our Live Member Chat Room and BAC has already rocketed on the settlement news but DBA is only just making the turn and still makes an excellent play that we’ll be adding to our Buy List (Members Only) along with 10 more picks we’ll be making this week. 

As you can see from Dave Fry’s SPY chart, we have set a new record for this decade for low volume on a full market day.  Last Christmas Eve was 43M on a half day, for example, but the Christmas Eve before that was 53M and those were the lowest two days I could find before I got bored looking (very scientific).  

Anyway, the point is that 38.9M is VERY LOW VOLUME – so low that paying attention to a dot on a chart that is drawn in such a light touch is just silly.  That makes yesterday’s jaunt over 2,000 completely meaningless and more so with the additional evidence of the intraday action which, as Dave notes, could not have been more manipulated.

This is why we have been pressing our bear bets.  Even though we have peace in Gaza and peace in Ukraine (for today) and even though we’ve forgotten about Europe’s negative GDP and China’s plunging property prices and Ebola – we still couldn’t find more than 38.9M buyers for SPY – that’s just sad!  

Speaking of China, last Monday, for FREE, right in the morning post, we picked the following on FXI:

We shorted India last week (EPI) and now FXI has got my mouth watering as a potentially good short.  I’d feel better about taking up a short on FXI at $45, not $42 but the Jan $42/38 bear put spread is just $1.80 on the $4 spread and that makes it very interesting as it pays 122% on a less than 10% decline in the Chinese markets – a nice way to hedge your bullish China bets!