Market Comment - February 7

(Marco Bonelli) Greece, no QE3, overbought market, tech bubble - are you kidding me?

At the current stage and still six weeks to go until Greece needs some cash to pay for another installment of their outstanding debt, the many contradicting comments about how the debt restructuring talks progress ("...we are only hours away from confirming the tentative deal...") are more a comical side-show than a real concern which fits into the complacent attitude of the stock-market towards the European debt crisis and it comes down to the point that there is no real new news (including the fact that Greek is in deep trouble)!


Since Facebook famously filed for its long awaited IPO last week, the argument about a bubble in the technology sector came up several times, especially when you combine the question with the 20+ percent performance of many technology sub-sectors. The valuation of Facebook is debatable and a little premature as the offering won't be priced until sometime Q2 but when you bring up the argument of bubble every time the index stages a double-digit rally it gets a bit ridiculous. Including the broad-based argument that the overall market is cheap and valuations are at historic lows (this by the way is also debatable), does that mean that everything else is worth buying but technology is not?

Anyway, the market decided that Greek is not worth paying too much attention to right now and with the Nasdaq (like all other major averages) recovering to close unchanged after the strong Friday performance it's basically all about the same: yes the market is overbought but many investors remain cautious and defensive, many market participants expect a pull-back or mini-correction while economic numbers continue to confirm a more serious recovery of the US Economy. Mixed data or a few disappointing statistics out of Europe (like Germany's weak industrial output from December - however, offset by stronger factory order yesterday) should not be a major surprise, the bigger concern probably falls to China as a further deterioration of the economy (as expressed by officials from the IMF, Fitch and the Chinese government) might not be on many roadmaps.

The Nasdaq confirmed its 11-year high territory, the Dow Jones confirmed its (slight) breakout of last year's highs and the SPX has less than one percent to go to do the same. With negative sentiment and investors underinvested, pull-backs may continue to be an intra-day phenomenon and further upside may still be the least expected. Having said that, further upside needs more positive catalysts than a few weeks ago. The employment data from Friday was one of these catalysts, CSCO's earnings and comments tomorrow could be another one.

Trade well.


(Marco Bonelli is the Managing Director of International for CL King & Associates in New York. The opinions expressed are his own.)