Trading Blog: TnT Group

Where to start….It started off to be a mixed information day and somewhat confusing.  Even looking at the individual Equity market net changes, you can see some confusion.

Canadian unemployment came out as better than expected in terms of jobs created but the rate rose to 8.1% from 8.  The Canadian Dollar and Yen stayed fairly weak much of the day against the other pairs.  US Dollar is flat.

One thing that stuck out around 10:30 was a 4000 lot S&P seller that came in at 1103.00.  Copper got smashed 4 cents following this and equities went on liquidation mode.  Nasdaq was trading 1887 and bottomed out at 1877.50, S&P was good for about 4 handles.  Lock it up.

Everything is unched on the week across the board and seems like things are waiting on the next clean indicator for direction.

Have a good weekend.

Hi.  My name is John Miller, trader of the TnT Group.  I will be conducting the Friday market commentary from here on out.

Today, as you can tell by the title was US unemployment.  The morning started off quiet with very low equity volume overnight ahead of the US data.  Canadian Unemployment came out unexpectedly worse, to -9.3K from an expectation of +12.5K.  Not a huge drop from the survey but a loss of 139k full-time jobs to be replaced with 130k part-time jobs is a bit concerning.  US unemployment in my opinion was bad but not terrible at -131k from -65k expected.  Another concern was last months revision from -125k to -221k.  A combination of both US and Canadian unemployment figures missing pointed to a more bearish signal for the equity markets and shows the economic “recovery” (if there ever was one in the first place this year) could be slowing.

Post Equity cash open there was a healthy pop in the market, which made holding shorts next to impossible.   Nasdaq buyers came in, most likely short covering from the bearish RIMM news earlier in the week, at one point NQ futures were +3.5 handles!  Basically once that buying stopped the rug got pulled and it was free for all through key support levels in equity outrights as well as spreads.

Not sure how long the selloff will continue going into next week, considering we have a rate decision on Tuesday.  We’ll see.

It’s been fun, have a good weekend, I’m off to go fishin!