Key News

• China cut interest rates for the third time in two months to stimulate growth as the global financial crisis undermines the world's fourth-largest economy. (Bloomberg)
• The International Monetary Fund, the European Union and World Bank on Tuesday agreed to a $25.1bn economic rescue package for Hungary to bolster confidence in its economy hit by the global financial crisis. (FT)

Key Reports Due (WSJ):

8:30a.m. Sep Durable Goods Orders: Expected: -1.8%. Previous: -4.5%.
2:15p.m. FOMC interest-rate annoucement: Previous: 1.5%.

Quotable

"All speculative bubbles have a kernel of truth behind them to justify their existence. This time around it was China and India. These emerging Asian giants were gobbling up all the commodities the world could produce to fuel their rapid industrialization.

“It wasn't that the story was untrue; it was old. Growing global demand probably was the reason for the gradual rise in oil prices from $20 a barrel to $40 earlier in the decade, and even to $60 by mid-2005.

“It was the moon shot to $147 that took on a life, and a litany, of its own. Emerging nations didn't start gobbling up crude, coal and copper all of a sudden in the middle of 2007.

Diversification Justification

“Yet analysts on TV and in print told us with a straight face that the doubling in oil prices from July 2007 to July 2008 was a result of fundamental demand, not speculative buying or investors, including pension funds, `diversifying' into `alternative investments' in search of `uncorrelated returns.' (It sounds a lot better than admitting you got suckered into buying what was going up and are now stuck with a pile of stuff that no one wants.)”

                                                             Caroline Baum

FX Trading –Correction upon us? AUD-JPY Bounce is due!
Buy the rumor of a 1% Fed Funds and sell the news?  Hmmm….Maybe today’s better than expected US durable goods orders will neutralize that in here. The key question: How long will this “correction” last?  Will the one-day correction make it to two?  Going back to June 1, 2008, the longest string of daily wins in the S&P 500 has been three; and it’s happened only five times since then.  And the moves haven’t been much, as you can see in the chart of the S&P 500 below identified by the green dots. 

You can also see the huge rally bar yesterday.  And taken from the intermediate-term high in September (where some decent consolidation appeared), the first Fib level (38.2%) carries the S&P to 1002.02 or 6.54%:

In short, the stock market, the global risk asset, is extremely oversold on many standard measures.  And we can say ditto for the commodities side of the fence.  It has been an almost straight-line risk aversion fear trade.  It’s been a huge driver for dollar and yen and bad for just about anything else out there.  But risk appetite is back on the table. 

The key risk currency pair Aussie – Japanese yen; this cross has been decimated.  So, if we are betting on some type of multi-week or more confidence flow in stocks, maybe it makes sense to be long the AUD/JPY pair in some form or another.

AUD/JPY Weekly:  That is what we would call parabolic down.  The breath-taking fall in this pair ERASED SEVEN YEARS OF GAINS IN LESS THAN FOUR MONTHS!  It was a complete retracement.

To suggest a bounce is due is quite and understatement.