Good Morning Traders and Investors,
From the get go, it looks like overseas markets were primarily weak, commodities off and dollar strength. US Futures are down slightly.
As for the economic calendar – it is fairly light, but we will touch on a few key points. As for the weather here in Park City, it is cold. Single digits at night and teens in the day. Makes fore great, light, fluffy snow, when it snows. Looks like there is a dusting out there, but we could use about 16-20 inches and that should get more terrain open.
- Monday – Bernanke – just before 1:00pm Eastern – always important to pay attention to his rhetoric
- Thursday – unemployment claims – looking for an estimate around 467k
- Friday – retail sales – aside from Bernanke – this is the big one for the week, but be careful as it probably didn’t capture Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Estimates are for a gain of 0.6%
$SPX still has resistance around 1115, until we go through it, the trend is still up but hasn’t made a new high. If you are getting nervous holding longs, protecting your portfolio with COVERED CALLS/BEAR CALLS continues to be a solid play. If you want to be a little more aggressive, MARRIED PUTS are very cheap to purchase.
A fun little channel trade is USO – looks like $37.00-$37.50 would be a buying opportunity with low risk as the buying the dips in the channel has worked out to be a nice risk:reward trade.
I will blog about forex in more specifics in a little bit so be on the lookout.
Happy Trading and Be Environmentally Cool
