Just Another Manic Monday

The NASDAQ sprinted to a new high in early trading today taking the NASDAQ 100 with it. There has been buying in all things tech, for those of you who know the term beta, this is called beta chasing. For those of you that don’t know, beta is the name given to describe how stocks move with the market. High beta stocks move more than the market while low beta stocks move less than the market and negative beta stocks move opposite the market.

We note that Monday’s volume was again on the light side. With all these new “highs” going on without volume, the bulls should be a little concerned but they seem not to have a care in the world. They seem to think the market has made it past all of the bad news concerning the economy, especially the housing market. The problem is that people have tightened their collective belt and will now start needing to pay down some of the credit they have strapped themselves with.

In the news for Tuesday is the PPI report which shows an expectation for another good sized drop of 0.6% with a “core” rate increase of 0.1%. These numbers compare to last month’s drop of 1.3% in the full number with an increase in the core rate of 0.6%.

The other Tuesday number is the retail sales. We don’t want to talk about expectations here because they could be off the mark. With Christmas sales right around the corner, there should be some concentration on these numbers. We expect some market reaction to them.

As is the case more and more, Tuesday will be a busy day and watching the market much at all will be difficult task. With that in mind we will be relying on our normal reads to tell us what’s going on during the day. Please leave a message in the comment section if you see anything unusual happening. Thanks.

Note: As a reminder the True Contrarian, at one of the links on the left, has put up a new post describing the course of the economy and gold over the next year or so. It's worth a quick read if you haven't read it already.

Dow Industrials: 12,131.88 +23.45
VIX: 10.87
QQQQ: 43.46 (new 52 wk closing high—highest in 5 years)
RYVNX: 17.44
RYAIX: 21.75
RYCWX: 37.10
TLT: 89.84
BEGBX: 13.85