Nasdaq at a new all-time closing high, US dollar falls

Quick Recap

Competing big news over night with the Nasdaq closing at its highest level every. That means that buyers who bought back in MArch 2000 are now, finally back in the money. But, while the Nasdaq is where all the focus is I’m interested in the raft of big misses in the ‘flash’ manufacturing PMI which stretched from China and Japan yesterday, through Europe and into the US.

FX Street Calendar

It’s a sign that the sweet spot for global growth has passed for the moment. But as I wrote at Business Insider this morning “of course it means more QE in Europe and Japan, more easing in China and perhaps a delay in the Fed. All of which almost guarantees stocks stay high.”

The Nasdaq is nowhere near as “dear” as it was back in 2000 and weak growth and a benign Fed tightening cycle can keep it elevated. It’s the same story with many other stock markets and while I struggle with their overall fundamental value the reality is that simple technicals indicators have, or should have, kept traders in the trend.

As I often write, “Rhetoric generally has no place in making money – not in a macro sense anyway.” Shorting individual companies is different.

Elsewhere overnight Euro is breaking up out and through the downtrend from last December, crude defied a short term felling it would pullback and pushed higher on worries about the Saudi’s continuing to bomb Yemen. Gold improved — bouncing from the range lows — and sits at $1,193. Copper is at $2.69 and Dalian iron ore, which was under 400 in trade yesterday, is sitting at 414.5 on my terminal this morning. That is huge!

On the day

On the data front today there is nothing big in Australia and Asia but in Germany IFO is out while in the US dureable goods will be huge.

Here’s the overnight scoreboard (8.42 am AEST):

• Dow Jones up 0.11% to 18,058
• Nasdaq up 0.41% to 5,056
• S&P 500 up 0.24% to 2,112
• London (FTSE 100) up 0.36% to 7,053
• Frankfurt (DAX) down 1.21% to 11,723
• Paris (CAC) down 0.62% to 5,178
• Tokyo (Nikkei) up to 20,187
• Shanghai (composite) up 0.37% to 4,414
• Hong Kong (Hang Seng) down 0.38% to 27,827
• ASX Futures (SPI June) up 31 to 5,861
• AUDUSD: 0.7773
• EURUSD: 1.0816
• USDJPY: 119.60
• GBPUSD: 1.5051
• USDCAD: 1.2146
• Crude: $57.58
• Gold: $1,193

CHART OF THE DAY:

NASDAQ – Monthly: It looks like it is heavily overdone mby conventional means. But, as I said above just using some simply technical indicators – in this case my pair of moving averages – has keep trader long for a number of years now.

More than 5 years now – its the same with many other indices.

Fundamental analysis is a big part of my process but like Jesse Livermore who has influenced my style more than anything I watch “the tape.”