Market notes and other stuff!

A few thoughts and the markets:

What’s the big difference between Obamacare and Trumpcare? Oh…you can’t think of something either. We actually don’t blame Trump. The fact is once an entitlement is put in place, it never goes away. The left’s goal was to get the country conditioned that health insurance was another “right” to be given away off the backs of others. While Trumpcare improves…the blob remains.

Signet Jewelers is the latest to shutter stores in the U.S….about 170. This is on top of:

Macys- 100 stores

Sports Authority- 460 stores

Walmart- 154 stores

Aeropostale- 154 stores

Kmart/Sears- 228 stores

Ralph Lauren- 50 stores

JC Penney- 140 stores

HHGregg- 88 stores

Abercrombie- 60 stores

Crox- 160 stores

Limited- 250 stores

This is just for starters. These listed companies as well as others have multi-year store closing plans. There is going to be a lot of real estate for sale.

As far as markets…just a normal pullback with some vicious rotation going on underneath the surface.

We told you recently that Biotech and Housing were showing up on our screens for the first time in a while. Housing has really come on strong as quite a few names have broken out into recent highs. Biotech has also come on and sits right under massive resistance.

On the other end, commodities continue to crack. We would continue to avoid just about everything here as oil prices have broken down. Oil stocks were already acting poorly. Gold and silver have been breaking down. The stocks led the metal. And now, steel, copper and all that stuff are now all breaking support/moving averages. The jello is certainly moving on the plate.

One area that we thought was moving out to the upside…bonds, tucked its head in like a frightened turtle and now looks to be breaking down. This off of better employment figures.

As far as major indices, it just feels like that 300 point upside day was somewhat of a climactic upside day where buyers emptied their ammo. This leads to stalling/ pullbacks. So far…no biggie but to repeat, we still have not had a 2% drop since the election. The longer that goes, the worse the eventual drop will be as the one-sided trade builds up. We are seeing some signs but not enough to slam markets yet. 1) New lows outpaced new highs yesterday. (Wow) 2) Small caps are once again lagging badly. 3) Foreign markets starting to feel some pain, particularly those leveraged to commodities.

But we repeat…as long as financials and semis do not crack, we doubt markets get in much trouble. They have both been leading markets up and down…and so far, there has been no give-back whatsoever. So far!