“When I saw that screen light up that day in the Merrill Lynch offices, I lost any residual doubt that Bloomberg could make it. We had picked just the right project. It was big enough to be useful, small enough to be possible. Start with a small piece, fulfill one goal at a time, on time. Do it with all things in life. Sit down and learn to read one-syllable words. If you try to read Chaucer in elementary school, you'll never accomplish anything. You can't jump to the end game right away, in computers, politics, love, or any other aspect of life.”
~ Mike Bloomberg
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Sample Content: Pre-Open Commentary

For the Live Feed comment stream, each trading day begins circa 9 a.m. EST or before (30 to 40 minutes prior to market open). We begin the day with “pre-open” commentary, along with trade setups, chart visuals, and pending order adjustments.

The following is actual market commentary, taken from the permanent Live Feed archives.

05/03 Pre-Open

9:01 am – May 3, 2011

The major indices are slightly lower in early trade, with weak revenue from Pfizer (PFE) and softness in commodity prices being blamed. Silver continues to do the roller coaster thing, down another stomach churning 5%. As our friend Peter Brandt recently noted, “8 years of global silver supply changed hands last week.” Talk about signs of froth! Gold and crude oil are down, perhaps in sympathy with silver, both in the neighborhood of 1%.

Our outlook has grown a little schizophrenic as of late. On the one hand, new highs in the major indices demand respect, as does the powerful institutional bid for “safe” equity names. On the other hand, the drivers for this rally are getting very long in the tooth and we are seeing more and more signs that the bulls are “running out of gas.” Prominent hedge fund players, like David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, are publicly throwing in the towel on their shorts. Longtime bearish analysts are throwing up their hands. And markets like silver shout “blowoff” from the rooftops.

Later today or tomorrow we will put together a thesis notes on volatility, further describing our thoughts on a long-dated volatility trade. By that we mean, a multi-month structured options position that is “set and forget” — you put it on and wait — that can benefit from another “flash crash” type move in equities, as the risk of a major volatility surge (to the downside) increases by the day (even as markets drip higher).

In new setups today we have a handful of shorts, all of them in broken or breaking charts, at a time when momentum outside favored large caps is waning:

  • Raytheon (RTN) is a defense name, in a group we are still bearish on (see thesis notes on defense stocks from 04/28).
  • Google (GOOG) is a broken high flyer that is making investors nervous with ramped up expenses under the new CEO, Larry Page. GOOG has also put in a giant island top more than six months in the making.
  • The financials (XLF) remain notably sick and weak in this market, and are now testing downtrend resistance.
  • As noted in weekend commentary, energy names have diverged with the major indices and are behaving poorly. Weatherford (WFT) is an oil service name with a particularly attractive bearish pattern.

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