Twitter

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Fed's Taper & Market Reaction

Federal Reserves will make a decision about its monetary taper in this upcoming week. Majority of analysts are expecting a taper. The question one should be asking right now is that how will the markets react to Fed's decision to taper. This is because only market's price reaction to the news pays, and not what the news was. As for the market, it has been rising nicely for the past 2 weeks. In fact, after bottoming on August 30 (the IPM Model bottom date), market has rallied to 1690 in 2 weeks i.e. an increase of ~70 points.

As we approach this critical week, markets are over-bought and some sentiment measures are touching optimistic extremes. This type of market behaviors asks us to be cautious over the next week or so.

If we had a Federal Reserves meeting scheduled with possibility of taper at a time when sentiment was pessimistic and market had been over-sold, it would have been a good time to buy the FOMC meeting's outcome. However, current market structure from an Elliott Wave perspective along with Market Matrix's analysis suggests that we might be in for a sideways to down market over the next few days.

From a global perspective, emerging markets are in a very interesting position. These markets have been in a downtrend since January 2013. Although they have seen a sharp rally over the past few weeks, this rally has brought the emerging market index at a critical resistance level.  If EEM fails to break sharply above recent highs, there is a serious potential that downtrend will resume.

Please note that according to proprietary market classification methodology, emerging markets recently entered a bear market in May 2013, and have been in a bear since then. Now the question remains if they will be able to break into a bull market, or the Bear will re-assert itself. Bear's reassertion would lead to widespread consequences. Next week will give us a better picture of how the emerging markets will react to Federal Reserve's monetary policy decision.

Finally, futures are rallying sharply on the decision of Larry Summers withdrawal as Fed's next chairman. This rally has taken most of U.S. indices to all time highs. It falls nicely in line with September Strategy


1 comment:

  1. Hi Naqvi, We had to wait until the end of your note before Larry summers is mentioned? LOL! for my money, I'll ride the volatility with my 8% equity position. I know, a small position, I wanted to stay small before the next, more significant IPM window. I think by then the Summers headlines will have been a distant memory and the "Summers Rally" will have dissipated. As always, be careful out there! Brad

    ReplyDelete

I would love to hear from you! Please leave your comment below!!