an tSionna {01.15.14}

Chart of the S&P 500 ETF SPY.  The Chart comes to us from FINVIZ.com.  The chart shows the market's directionless so far this year, although as I'm writing this the market is flirting with new highs for 2014.  

Stock's trading this year is different from 2011-2013 when we started out strong from the gate.  Then again we didn't see the massive kinds of gains in any of those previous years that we saw in 2013.  Stocks also were pretty undervalued back then and it's hard to make that case now.  I'm not in the doom and gloom camp for 2014.  As I'll detail in a future post  I think stocks could potentially see gains in the 4-10% range this year.  But probability suggests we might see more of a 1 step forward two steps back type of market, especially in the first half of the year.  Probability also suggests that we'll see at least one correction in the 10% plus camp this year.  That's something you have to go back to the spring of 2012 to have seen and the last correction of any real heft was in in the summer of 2011.  Again hopefully I'll be able to go into more detail on this in a future post.

I will be out tomorrow at meetings so the next post here will be Friday.

*Long ETFs related to the S&P 500 in client and personal accounts.