The Overnight Report: Foiled Again

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By Greg Peel

The Dow closed down one point to 12,981 while the S&P added 0.1% to 1367 and the Nasdaq rose 0.1%.

From 11.30am to just before 4pm, the Dow danced along the 13,000 line. If ever there was a session in which the Dow might close above the magic number it was last night's. After rising steadily all last week in consistent moves up of a dollar or more, last night oil finally took a breather.

Brent crude fell US$1.60 to US$123.87/bbl while West Texas fell US$2.14 to US$107.63/bbl. Recent strength in the oil price has been driven by tensions with Iran, and while those tensions have not diminished they haven't really heightened over the last week either. At some point oil's near term run had to take a rest, and talk of demand destruction in the US as prices at the pump rise to onerous levels is a good enough reason to take some profits.

The Dow had opened 100 points down from the opening bell as Wall Street provided its first response to the outcome of the G20 meeting held on the weekend. At that meeting the IMF asked members for more contributions, ostensibly to provide a bigger buffer against Europe, but non-European nations insisted eurozone nations must first increase their contributions to their EFSF as the first line of defence. Given eurozone nations have already been bled dry and are not happy about it, markets assumed we were back to a position of impasse.

Really it all hinges on Germany, where Angela Merkel's government is already unpopular and faces likely defeat at the next election were it to pledge more German taxpayer money to help out lazy Greeks and others. The German parliament did, however, pass the new bail-out deal for Greece last night.

The other issue is that while the haircut and bond swap arrangement for private sector Greek bondholders has been formalised in the Greek parliament, having been agreed upon by representatives of those holders at last week's negotiations, there still must be agreement from two-thirds of bond holders for the deal to go through. Hence further nervousness.

But the trend on Wall Street of late has been to use any of these dips on fresh European fear as an opportunity to buy stocks. The indices thus bounced quickly off their opening lows last night, and were further boosted early on with the US pending homes sales data for January. They showed a 2% gain in the month to the highest level since April 2010 and pending sales are up 8% annually. In April 2010, new buyers were boosted by the Obama tax credit stimulus.

Pending sales don't always convert to actual sales, and we need to wait to March sales data to see if that 2% is converted at all. But it's another little piece of increasingly more positive US data, and Wall Street was happy to take it. Shortly after the release of pending home sales, news came through about the successful passage of the Greek bail-out deal through the German parliament, and another fire was lit.

Yet still the Dow failed at 13,000 and despite the clear buying interest on any dips the feeling is a pullback must soon come. Indeed, Wall Street traders seem almost to be willing on a pullback as an opportunity to get onto a later rally that will indeed be the 13k breaker.

Lead had a bit of a pop last night, jumping 2%, while the other metals were steady. Gold dropped US$5.00 to US$1767.40/oz on oil's fall and a stronger US dollar index, which was up 0.3% to 78.56. With stability supposedly now returned to the Australian government, the Aussie is up 0.6% since Friday to US$1.0760.

The SPI Overnight was down one point.

There are some more important US data out tonight, including durable goods, but before then we'll see another late batch of local earnings reports with today's highlights being those of Boral ((BLD)), Harvey Norman ((HVN)) and QBE ((QBE)).

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