Francis H. States...
- Yesterday was fun. The Dow Jones had three swings of 150+ points up and down over the course of the day from high to low. According to work done by Howard Silverblatt over at S&P Capital IQ however, this is nothing. His data, going back to 1963, shows that the current high/low spread in the S&P 500 is only a modest 0.95% this year compared to 1.07% in 2012 and 1.64% in 2010 and 1.47% average over the period - so more wild swings ahead are certainly possible and maybe inevitable.
- Yesterday's mid-day swoon was ostensibly caused by a speech from Mario Draghi that QE was "relatively unlikely" but since the meeting was private, the street is still of the belief that some sort of quantitative easing remains on the agenda. Ukrainian sanctions escalated from the EU and the US yesterday but despite Canada sending six CF-18 fighter jets to assist NATO operations in eastern Europe, tensions seem to have eased a bit, at least in traders' minds (my experience is that traders can only focus on one thing at a time - and today we're back to digesting earnings).
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