Anything But Easy

You didn't miss much if you were already on vacation.

While traders had a lot of data to sort through and a potentially new trading tax to fear, we closed the day pretty much where it began with holiday-thin trading volume.

Like most days it seems, most of the interesting action occurred within the first half hour of trading as we dropped below S&P 1,100 but then quickly found support at 10:AM and then never breached those first hour lows. If I didn't know any better, the programs simply desired to wipe out some stops at that level before attempting to rally higher even though the action overall was far from impressive.

Much like today, we have another full schedule in the morning with durable goods, personal income and jobless claims prior to the open and reports on consumer sentiment, new home sales, and oil inventories after that. Once those reports are provided, we'll have our first clue to whether the positive seasonality usually seen between the two days around Thanksgiving is going to repeat. I'm certainly not holding my breath as this week so far has been anything but easy to trade, but all the same, I don't expect it to be this difficult either.

We'll see how it plays out.