Sunday, April 13, 2008

You'd think that when the CEO of a major corporation, especially one as importance as GE comes out and says "We are going to have great earnings, its going to be a blow" he wouldn't have worded it incorrectly and instead said "Our earnings are going to blow", but that's just what he did. Jack Welsh, Immulet is not.

S&P500 was down 27.72 points (2.04%) and closed at 1332.83

The NASAQ triggered a trap, closing down 61.46 points (2.61%) and closed at 2290.24

S&P600 Small Cap Index also had a difficult day losing 9.44 points (2.53%) closing at 363.99

NASDAQ Volume was around 1.8billion shares, a decent dip from yesterday
We saw 10 New Highs and 122 New Lows on the NASDQ
NYSE Volume also dropped slightly to 1.17 Billion Share
The Big Board saw 24 New Highs and 50 new lows.

As I stated at the start of today's commentary General Electric's terrible earnings surprise yesterday thew the market into fits. The CEO of a major corporation does not just come out and promise blowout numbers then screw the pooch when the actual numbers come out. This caused a lot of worry, especially when that particular company is seen as being a barometer to the overall economy. Rising oil prices. I'm going to give today a pass because of volume, but also due to the fact that leading stocks held up pretty well overall, and we had a situation where they could have very easily fallen apart, but I'd say overall its held decently.

My involved in the market has remained very tepid. I just read the other day that the average mutual fund is down around 14% for the year and the average hedge fund over 10%. All year I have really been fretting the fact that maybe my clients would be unhappy with me for having such a large cash position (we've averaged about 80% thus far for 2008) and not producing huge gains, but all have expressed great pleasure with what I'm doing. One of the key things to trading, which I learned long ago, is simply not to go broke, nor allow yourself the opportunity to suffer a drawdown you can not recover from. This is the most important thing, everything else really is secondary. There will come times ago where you can grab 20% + quarterly returns, but for me right now is one of them, so I'm taking very few but carefully selected trades, most of which I have explained here on my blog.

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