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Strategies & Market Trends : The Options Box -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Z who wrote (512)	5/21/2000 9:10:00 PM
From: Poet	Respond to of 10876

Hi Mark and thread, Well, the state is now a couple of bushels of crabs lighter than it was on Friday and I'm suffering from Old Bay-induced bloat. <g> What a nasty day on Friday. I hope no one here got hurt. I'm long some June RMBS calls that are looking considerably anemic, but we'll see what happens this week. Here's a snippet from the Sunday Option Investor newsletter, regarding general market direction: "Looking ahead, the May consumer confidence numbers are due out Tuesday at 10:00 AM ET. Traders will be looking for a cooling of consumer sentiment that may show that the economy might be starting to slow. Then, on Thursday, the Commerce Department will be reporting revived GDP numbers. Don't look for either data sets to have much of an impact on investor sentiment. With little economic news to focus on, many analysts believe that the market will continue to fret about the prospect of more interest rate hikes after the Federal Reserve ratcheted up borrowing costs by a half percentage point last Tuesday. Thus, without a catalyst to give the market the support it needs over the short-term, observers expect a tight trading range to hold over the next week or two, which really isn't all that unusual. Contrary to popular belief, there isn't always a trend to play. Believe it or not, the market trades sideways nearly 70 percent of the time. On a brighter note, one indicator that may portent an abatement in near-term bearishness is the put/call ratio at the CBOE, which finished at a historically high 0.88. This could mean that the wall of worry is finally sufficiently high enough that some investors may want to take a crack at climbing it. Another indicator pointing to a possible rally are individual investors, who apparently haven't lost their appetite for equities. An estimated $13.1 billion flowed into U.S. stock funds in the week ended Wednesday, up from $5.2 billion the previous week, according to TrimTabs."