Afternoon Thread



Toes is ready, ladies.  Show him your ...

The markets did not jump on the Greece bailout news today.  That's different.  It very well may be that news from the continent cannot be anything but and anchor from now 'til ....  ???

Crude continues to be a drag on transports and if there is no relief soon it may whack the retail sector.

Morning Thread

Gator's Chart of the Day: Crude Oil

Crude has been trading in a fairly tight channel for three months.  The range has generally been from 96 to 103 but after closing at a new high on Thursday it has gapped up and is holding (as of Monday night.)

News that Iran has stopped selling to the UK and France is causing increased pressure to the upside and U.S. gasoline prices are spiking too.  They are already at seasonal highs and news reports are predicting the national average to exceed $4/gal by April.

I expect transports will struggle short term.  They have been lagging of late and these prices will not help them.

Monday Thread

Why am I talking retail? Retailers typically use a fiscal year which is not the same as the calendar year (Christmas!) For this reason, retailers typcially report earnings in the second half of the quarter.

WMT and HD are 2 of the biggest heavy weights and both report earnings Tuesday morning. By the way, both are members of the Dow Jones 30 - so these 2 stocks will move the Dow on Tuesday. Dow 13,000, and new 52 week highs on the SP500, depend on retail.

Two ETFs track retail and these are quite different in their composition. RTH, shown above, is the "BIG Box" ETF, with over 11% in WMT, and over 6% in each of HD and AMZN (and another 5% in each of LOW, CVS and WAG). XRT, on the other hand is very diverse, with no retailer comprising more than 2%, and its largest 3 holdings are WINN, NFLX and PBY.