April 28…)
“Only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.” Dorothy Parker
Just in: President Trump signed an executive order today requiring commercial truck drivers in the United States to be proficient in English (source: X, quoting Karoline Leavitt). The order directs Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to strengthen inspection procedures to ensure compliance with English proficiency requirements. I did some digging, and there are no stats on this (LOL, surprised?), but estimates suggest that 500,000 of 3.5 million truckers can’t speak English. If they try to get a license… bye-bye. This might be bad for WMT, not sure. Bad for someone, IMO. NFP next month? Inflation?
In the markets
The stock market fluctuated on Monday, meaning it started higher, went lower, and came full circle (in a vertical sense) back to where it started the session. I would need a subpoena and a grand jury to discover if the reasons for these moves are the absence of activity, an imbalance of it, or both.
Unfortunately, volume and OI are experiencing a type of recidivist backsliding, very much like last fall and January, when vols, ranges, narratives, and sentiment fell into a trance-like hypnosis. In a nutshell, the S&P was at 6200, then some heavies unloaded, prices crumbled, and now we’re here at 5500-ish. Same market, just 10% to 15% cheaper, poorer.
My two cents is a fitting contribution to the curious. There isn’t enough money to pay for the rips and rallies of yore when the government sent everyone a check and mainlined $6 trillion into stocks. This is so not “run hot.” This is the detox. It takes a lot of money to get to 6000 on the S&P, and that money left the building weeks ago.
Gold popped above the POC in NY on light volume. Open interest and volume are falling. Futures traders are leaving in droves. Actually, they already left weeks ago (next chart). This is the night shift locking up.
The CFTC said the same thing last Friday with the latest COT report showing the lowest spec length since March 2024 (MM longs below in white, gold in blue).
At any rate, for those of us who trade gold, the $3340 POC is getting stronger. That doesn’t mean the market is getting stronger; it means when prices move away from $3340, and they will, the greatest number of losing trades will be located at $3340. The loser always drives the trend.
Gold seemed overly sensitive to a fairly small move in the dollar today. I think some over-eager specs have been shorting it because of last week’s reversal and are getting chopped up.
Dollars on a bad close, bonds look promising, oil is soft, bitcoin is indecisive, and the vibe to wind things up tonight…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to market vibes to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.