Stock Market Cliff Limbo and Holiday Spending Confusion

By: PhilStockWorld

Courtesy of Doug Short writes: Christmas 2012 is now a memory and presumably congress and the president will be knuckling down to deal with the Cliff deadline, although the winter-weather flight cancellations may slow the process. Meanwhile, the market is biding its time. The S&P 500 opened fractionally higher and hit its intraday high, up 0.19%, in the first fifteen minutes of trading. The index then rolled over to its intraday low, off 0.72%, around 11:30 AM. The index then struggled its the low but buckled in the last hour of trading to a closing loss of 0.48%, the third consecutive finish in the red.

There was a bit of confusion about the holiday spending that doubtless influenced some of today’s trades. MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse said that seasonal spending was the weakest since 2008. But later in the day Gallup claims consumer spending surged during the Pre-Christmas weekend. We really won’t have anything remotely solid until the December retail sales are released in a few weeks.

Here is a 5-minute chart of today’s action.

The S&P 500 is now up 12.90% for 2012 but 3.13% below the interim closing high of September 14th.

From a longer-term perspective, the index is 109.9% above the March 2009 closing low and 9.3% below the nominal all-time high of October 2007.

For a better sense of how these declines figure into a larger historical context, here’s a long-term view of secular bull and bear markets in the S&P Composite since 1871.

- Phil

www.philstockworld.com

Philip R. Davis is a founder of Phil's Stock World (www.philstockworld.com), a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders. Mr. Davis is a serial entrepreneur, having founded software company Accu-Title, a real estate title insurance software solution, and is also the President of the Delphi Consulting Corp., an M&A consulting firm that helps large and small companies obtain funding and close deals. He was also the founder of Accu-Search, a property data corporation that was sold to DataTrace in 2004 and Personality Plus, a precursor to eHarmony.com. Phil was a former editor of a UMass/Amherst humor magazine and it shows in his writing -- which is filled with colorful commentary along with very specific ideas on stock option purchases (Phil rarely holds actual stocks). Visit: Phil's Stock World (www.philstockworld.com)

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