Whether you're in stocks, trading, or both, this is a market environment with a lot of "loose ends," to put it mildly.
Most of these loose ends relate to the headlines – or, to put a point on it, tweets – that are roiling the market every day, sometimes several times a day
Just as trade war fears had ebbed thanks to China seeming to take a "let's be friends" approach to the recent tariff saber-rattling, a new fear entered the fray: potential military action in Syria, with the even scarier potential of dragging Russia in.
But that, too, has calmed somewhat, as the administration walked back some of its more aggressive messaging.
And as a result, the big three indexes moved into mixed trading today, though as of this afternoon, they were still up for the week.
Elsewhere, Mark Zuckerberg's duels with the Congress and Senate are over (for now), but we still don't know the severity of the government's regulations on Facebook Inc. (Nasdaq: FB). And Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) has bounced back around 7% off its recent low – which tweets also caused. But it's still facing an uncertain future.
After all, the stock that put the "F" in "FANG stocks" is seemingly just another presidential tweet away from declining again.
The market is starving for a resolution of all this "headline risk," and as a result, even though we've seen some relative calming in the news cycle, we're still mired in uncertainty – the kind of uncertainty that makes for big swings.
And then there's earnings season, the reason I'm writing today…
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About the Author
Chris Johnson is a quant - he's obsessed with building and perfecting mathematical models that allow him to predict, with startling accuracy, the direction of the markets, entire sectors, and individual securities. For the last year, he's been researching and building a new system that lets him move swiftly in and out of the hottest stocks in the market for life-changing gains - entirely on his own terms. The results of his newly-minted Night Trader system are nothing short of amazing.
Chris also contributes to Money Morning as the Quant Analysis Specialist.
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