Daily Market Reports | May 24 2012
By Greg Peel
The Dow closed down 6 points while the S&P closed up 0.2% to 1318 and the Nasdaq gained 0.4%.
There seemed to be a lot of anticipation heading into the informal meeting in Brussels of the EU finance ministers, as if there might be some world-saving announcement forthcoming. The reality is and was always going to be that nothing earth-shattering was ever likely – such meetings rarely produce more than motherhood statements and this one was merely “informal”, ahead of the next formal meeting at the end of June. At that point the result of the Greek election result will be known.
One presumes that by that stage the EU will have worked out what it intends to do. The meeting is only now looking to break up as I write but has been going on all through the late Europe and Wall Street sessions. Markets have been jumping at every little report or lack thereof. Early on in the proceedings a team of ministerial advisors making up the oddly named Eurogroup Working Group advised all ministers to begin preparing for a Greek exit. I mean, why wouldn't you? But markets across the globe decided the didn't like the sound of that.
The UK, German and French stock markets all subsequently closed down around 2.5%. The euro fell through US$1.26 for the first time since July 2010. From the opening bell, Wall Street started selling and kept selling to past midday, at which point the Dow was down 191 points and the S&P 500 had fallen below 1300.
But then everything began to go the other way.
The euro has not made much of a recovery but from 2.30pm the recovery rally on Wall Street really began to accelerate. There was some positivity taken from the apparent teaming up of the French, Italian and Spanish finance ministers to petition the German minister for the introduction of a eurozone bond. Such a bond is seen as potentially a major saviour, as it would allow the ECB to conduct standard QE a la the Fed. The problem is that Germany is dead against such an idea. The reason is simple – a eurozone bond would simply be akin to Germany giving every one of the other 16 members a bunch of blank cheques.
The recovery nevertheless appeared a bit too robust to be based merely on a bit of bond chatter. More realistically, Wall Street would have been looking towards the upcoming long weekend. With this EU meeting out of the way there's not much on the agenda before the Greek election and then the end of the month is due next week as well. On 200 Dow points down, it was a good time to cover shorts.
The technical aspect was no doubt in force as well. Passing through the 1300 mark in the S&P seemed enough of a psychological reason to cover at that point, at which on an intraday basis the broad index was down 8.8% from its March high. Not quite a 10% “correction”, but close enough.
The bottom line is there is no new news from Europe. If one saw only Wall Street's closing prices from last night and not it's intraday moves this would have seemed an unsurprising session.
Lost in the euro-wash last night were some more positive US housing data. Sales of new homes rose 3.3% in April, beating expectations. New home sales are up 14% year on year. The FHFA house price index, measuring prices on Fannie/Freddie mortgaged homes, rose 1.8% in March.
The US housing sector might be looking healthier but it's still a case of fun and games in tech. Is the PC dead? Well if you follow only Dell you might think so, with its shares down 17% last night after a big earnings miss reported late on Tuesday. However Hewlett Packard reported after the bell last night and the end result is a 9% share price rally in the after-market. And stop the presses, Faceplant actually found some buyers. Its shares rose 3% despite news shareholders intend to sue everyone down to Zuckerberg's dog for the listing stuff up.
Given the euro did not bounce quite as spectacularly as US stocks, the US dollar index finished up another 0.5% to 82.07 last night. London base metals closed ahead of the US recovery, with falls of 1-2% across the board. Oil was similarly impacted, with Brent down US$2.35 to US$106.06/bbl and West Texas falling US$1.43 to US$90.42/bbl.
Gold managed to hold up pretty well, with only a US$5.90 fall to US$1562.60/oz. US bonds were not convinced by the stock rally, falling 7bps to 1.72%. Nor were currency traders convinced, sending the Aussie down over half a cent to US$0.9752.
We had a rather weak session in Australia yesterday ahead of the EU meeting so on Wall Street's flat close, the SPI Overnight is up 13 points or 0.3%.
Stand by today for the HSBC flash estimate of China's May manufacturing PMI today. With Beijing in stimulus mode, a bad result might actually be a good result. Tonight we have the eurozone's composite PMI estimate just to brighten one's day, and German businesses will let us know how they feel about things in the monthly IFO survey. The UK will revise its March quarter GDP number, and then the US will release durable goods numbers.
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