Nikkei 225

If asking traders where stocks and oil would be trading one day after a weekend in which the Doha OPEC meeting resulted in a spectacular failure, few if any would have said the S&P would be over 2,100, WTI would be back over $40 and the VIX would be about to drop to 12 and yet that is precisely where the the S&P500 is set to open today, hitting Goldman's year end target 8 months early, and oblivious of the latest batch of poor earnings news, this time from Intel and Netflix, both of which are sharply down overnight.

Following yesterday's OPEC "production freeze" meeting in Doha which ended in total failure, where in a seemingly last minute change of heart Saudi Arabia and specifically its deputy crown prince bin Salman revised the terms of the agreement demanding Iran participate in the freeze after all knowing well it won't, oil crashed and with it so did the strategy of jawboning for the past 2 months had been exposed for what it was: a desperate attempt to keep oil prices stable and "crush shorts" while global demand slowly picked up.

Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Is The Bull Market Back, Or Is It A Trap?

I wish I had a more definitive answer for you this week, but the market is standing at the proverbial “crossroads” of bull and bear.

Excerpted from Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin,

Another unsettled week for global markets. Japan’s Nikkei equities index rallied 6.5%. Italian bank stocks surged 10%, with the Europe STOXX 600 Bank Index up 8.1%. Germany’s DAX equities index rallied 4.5%, with Spanish stocks up 5.0% and Italian 4.3%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng Financials index surged 5.9%. The EM market rally continued. U.S. bank stocks jumped 7.0%. A Friday evening Bloomberg headline: “Rough Week for Shorts as Banks Send S&P 500 to Four-Month High.”

Less than six months after we pointed out that the BoJ owns 52% of the entire Japanese ETF market, Reuters reports that the Kuroda's Peter Pan fairy tale, aka the Bank of Japan, is thinking about buying even more. The BoJ is said to be currently buying $30 billion of ETF's a year under its current policy, however since the Nikkei is down over 10% this year, that figure is apparently not enough to keep the market propped up.

Here's how the BoJ's holdings in the Japanese ETF market looked visually in recent months: