DOW Industrials Bull Trap spotted?:

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Perfect Stock Alert

Tonight he discussed a possible Bull Trap on the Dow. This is a formation where the Bulls get sucked into buying the market thinking it's getting to a new high. But it's a shallow uptrend and on thin volume that fails to overcome the strength of the shorts. Until the shorts cover, there's nothing to propel the market higher.

The "trigger" that will initiate a short-covering spike up, or a fearful sell-off, is like to be the employment numbers tomorrow. Remember that we also have a quadruple options expiration (quadruple witching is what it's called) on Friday.

Here.. just watch for yourself and make your own mind up:

Bull Trap for the DOW?

They also covered the only ETF I currently hold a position in (and waiting to add to when I see a major shift in market direction).

TZA Ultra-Bear analysis

If the numbers don't come in good tomorrow and we start a sell-off, be prepared for SERIOUS UGLINESS in the markets.

I continue to look for rays of sunshine that might give me reason to be bullish, but their all being overshadowed by the BP oil spill. From my reading that's only likely to get worse, not better. And that potentially means that the entire shoreline of the gulf coast will likely be inundated with oil. Florida ALREADY has serious real estate issues, and Miami is on the brink of bankruptcy. Put waves of oil on it's beaches and coral reef and it will be years before it becomes a tourist location, or draws "snowbirds" in their retirement.

There have been nothing but an abundance of lies surrounding this blown oil well..

BP has lied through their teeth.

It was 5,000 barrels at first, and the big dog and pony show over "top kill", but what they didn't tell you was that it was gushing 60K-100K barrels per day and that the well casing was fractured deep into the sea floor. Capping this well would only cause that intense 7,000 psi torrent to tear into the bore hole and surrounding formation and pop out through fractures in the sea floor. So they have to let it spew and just try to contain and collect as much of the oil as they can.

The only hope for resolving the problem is the relief well, where they are trying to drill several boreholes to intersect the current one. Somewhere I read it's tantamount to shooting a dinner plate from 20 miles away. The technology is good, but do not count on any success anytime soon. They have another 20,000 feet to drill from what I'm reading. That's going to a Xmas gift the entire world will look forward to. But it means that oil is going to spew for another 6 months, at least (IMO).

If you're planning a trip to the Florida keys, or the Caribbean, I would suggest you do it very soon.

EDIT:

Philadelphia Fed Survey comes in SUBSTANTIALLY LOWER than consensus

The employment data was slightly worse than expected, but the real "bell ringer" was the Philly Index coming at a measly "8" instead of the consensus of "20":

Philly Index comes in a 8 instead of consensus of 20

The prior reading was 21, so this is a SIGNIFICANT DOWNWARD TREND and indicates the underlying weakness of business and manufacturing conditions now that the Government stimulus is coming to an end. Again.. we go from 21 to 8 within the space of a few months:

historical Philly Fed Survey

Recall that despite spending over 10% of our GDP on this stimulus, we managed to only obtain a 3% overall GDP gain. So that has the market wondering where GDP growth is going to come from without a new stimulus.

And, of course, we have BP's CEO on the hotseat today and I expect some very hard questioning about exactly how much oil is spewing forth, and the market will extrapolate the future economic and ecological damage that will result.

For now BP will remain a going concern, but I suspect that within a year or two, BP will no longer exist in it's current form. It will be acquired, or declare bankruptcy and it's assets sold off.


Scrutinizer