Equities Close Monday's Gap Down On Lowest Average Trade Size Of Year

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/26/2012 16:13 -0400

• European Central Bank
• Fibonacci

CRAAPL taketh and Draghi giveth it all back. The question remains - given all the front-running anticipatory moves on the back of jawbone after jawbone, will ECB/Fed action have anything but a brief romance with higher prices when/if it occurs? The S&P 500 pushed up to fill its Monday opening gap-down on a reasonable volume day (heading into T-3 from month-end shenanigans) but the participation is absolutely not what one would expect if this was belief with S&P 500 e-mini futures seeing their lowest average trade size of the year. Gold was a winner again as the USD was sold against everything. Treasuries gave back some of their gains - yields leaking higher by around 3-5bps at the mid- to long-end. Credit and equity stayed largely in sync but the former was quiet and likely being reracked more than traded as it gapped at the open and stayed there. Stocks took off from their broad-risk-asset peers from the day-session open, retested VWAP, then pushed back to highs into the close - ending well above risk-assets' view of the world as correlations fell modestly. VIX ended the day down 2 vols at 17.5% but was unable to close the gap to Friday's close like stocks - which closed (rather coincidentally, given month-end, at June's closing price)
Lower pane is average trade size for the S&P 500 - today was the lowest of the year - suggesting very little professional participation... ES remains in this fibonacci retracement block which feels very much like a correction in a downtrend...


Gold remains pushed higher as did everything else on Draghi's words...


and equities pushed into a world of their own this afternoon relative to a relatively highly correlated risk asset proxy...


Charts: Bloomberg and Capital Context