After trending down on Tuesday through Thursday, the major indexes staged a strong rally on Friday that left the indexes with a nice gain for the week. Friday's bullish mood came after core capital expenditure for durable goods was better than expected and followed the Fed promising to keep interest rates low for an extended period. It was also clear they are ready to print more money, if necessary, as inflation expectations are currently low. Continued cheap money, with the promise of more to come, is good for asset prices, so as long the domestic economy does not threaten a double dip and global conditions continue to improve, then the markets will continue to move higher. In the global context, markets in South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Singapore and Philippines have risen to multi-year highs, and for Jakarta, to an all time high. (See Succinct summation of week’s events).

Also at The Big Picture, we had confirmation of what has been visible in our daily market commentaries and charts - volumes are falling.


A weekly chart of the NASDAQ Composite confirms the downward trend in volumes. NASDAQ volumes did rise above the 50 day average for the week, but the biggest volume days were the two distribution days on Tuesday and Wednesday, so although the index gained for the week, the contribution of volume to the gain is questionable. How long can the markets continue to rise if volume remains anemic?

No new features this week

Limiting the Number of Email Alerts You Receive

Because we issue alerts when the breakout price is reached, regardless of the volume, a sudden spike in market valuations can lead to an excessively large number of alerts being issued.

When the markets opened on Friday, September 24, 2010, the leading indexes immediately gapped higher and had risen by over 1% by 10 am. In the first thirty minutes we issued 17 alerts and by the end of the day had issued a total of 67.

Of these, only 15 reached our nominal breakout volume of 1.5 times ADV with the result that your inbox was cluttered with many alerts which were never going to reach anything like a desirable volume level.

There are two ways you can limit the number of alerts you receive:

1. Use a Personal Watchlist (PWL) to setup a list of stocks on which you only wish to receive alerts. If you haven't used the PWL mechanism, there are instructions on how to use it at our PWL Help page.
2. Use filters to limit the characteristics of stocks on our watchlists so you only receive alerts when stocks meet your criteria. There is a video tutorial on how to do this.