Let’s quickly review the past week in the markets. There is so much data flooding in right now, much of it conflicting, that it’s worth putting it into a single spot so that we can keep track of it better.
Market Data
Friday gave an especially poor finish to the week, with the S&P losing a hefty 2.9% (-31.60 points) and revisiting the old ‘flash crash’ lows. I thought those were supposed to be a mistake? Maybe not.
The S&P 500 opened the year at 1116.56 and is now down -4.6% from that start. Clearly all is not yet well here in the land of stocks, the glowing earnings bonanza notwithstanding.
The Dollar
Once you figure out one set of correlations, it goes to heck. Prior to this year, you could count on two things happening when the dollar dropped — stocks and gold going up. Now the opposite is happening.
The dollar has been dropping quite convincingly for the past month and a half and is now approaching support at the 81-82 level.
As always, I think it crazy that the world’s reserve currency trades like an Internet stock from the 1990’s. It’s all over the place, and this makes life on business people – and anyone who is trying to make plans for the future – very hard.
At any rate, when the dollar went down not too long ago, gold went up. Not anymore.
Gold
Gold, too, had a rough day on Friday, but that is not
by former_user 
