S&P futures are little changed at 6am ET, trading at 2347.55 and paring an earlier 0.4 percent drop, on the back of the USDJPY ramp which for the second day in a row has emerged alongside the European open, just as the key 110 support level appears in danger, soothing concerns about the Fed's balance sheet reduction and "some" Fed officials warning that stocks have gotten expensive.
Following weeks of utter comaplcency, there are signs that investors are beginning to hedge for potential U.S. stock swings around France’s presidential ballot.
As Bloomberg writes, futures on the CBOE Volatility Index
expiring in the next month are now trading around the same level as
contracts maturing a month later.
In fact the VIX term structure briefly inverted on Monday...
Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
Energy stocks have not been a good buy and hold investment for the past few years. Looking back over the past 5-years, XLE has lagged all of the S&P 500 sectors and it is the only S&P sector that has a negative 5-year return. Could this trend be ending? A couple of things have caught our eye of late, from a Power of the Pattern perspective.
European stocks rebounded after a downbeat start, aided by a return to the post-Euro open momentum ignition in the USDJPY while Asian stocks rose after China shares surged 1.5%, the most since August. For now S&P futures are fractionally in the red, although we expect them to turn progressively higher as US traders get to their desks to frontrun the now traditional "post open" ramp.