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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…
About the Author
Chris Johnson is a highly regarded equity and options analyst who has spent much of his nearly 30-year market career designing and interpreting complex models to help investment firms transform millions of data points into impressive gains for clients.
At heart Chris is a quant - like the "rocket scientists" of investing - with a specialty in applying advanced mathematics like stochastic calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, and statistics to Wall Street's data-rich environment.
He began building his proprietary models in 1998, analyzing about 2,000 records per day. Today, that database, which Chris designed and coded from scratch, analyzes a staggering 700,000 records per day. It's the secret behind his track record.
Chris holds degrees in finance, statistics, and accounting. He worked as a licensed broker for 11 years before taking on the role of Director of Quantitative Analysis at a big-name equity and options research firm for eight years. He recently served as Director of Research of a Cleveland-based investment firm responsible for hundreds of millions in AUM. He is also the Founder/CIO of ETF Advisory Research Partners since 2007, noted for its groundbreaking work in Behavioral Valuation systems. Their research is widely read by leaders in the RIA business.
Chris is ranked in the top 99.3% of financial bloggers and top 98.6% of overall experts by TipRanks, the track record registry of financial analysts dating back to January 2009.
He is a frequent commentator on financial markets for CNBC, Fox, Bloomberg TV, and CBS Radio and has been featured in Barron's, USA Today, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal, and numerous books.
Today, Chris is the editor of Night Trader and Straight-Up Profits. He also contributes to Money Morning as the Quant Analysis Specialist.
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