MONDAY MORNING, EYES ON EUROPE!

Europe remains the driver this morning although we are not falling out of bed over the Italian auction which went well enough to prevent hell from breaking out. Still they sold bonds at record high yields and the Euro is down a little less than a cent this morning. This took futures which were higher over night, a little lower before the open. But overall its just down by a handful of ticks and nothing this morning is indicating that we are going to have one of those gut wrenching down days. Tick for tick just watch the euro. Its that simple. As for the charts the mlp index bounced right off the positive upsloping moving averages. 375 is the resistence wall. The dow chart is at resistance as we are right at the top of this rally which we first hit back on October 21st when Europe solved their problems again. A breakout higher from here takes us to about 12800 which would be the highs for the year. The 200 day moving average (not shown on these charts) has been the turnback point so far. Lets see what today brings.

One piece of new this morning comes from QR Energy which announces good earnings and note in the press release that they have already announced the next distribution which has a 15% increase in it. Other than that its a quiet morning with no other news and so far no upgrades or downgrades.

So another week begins. Lots of economic data this week that might matter if it shows that recession is back on the table. Crude and nat gas are lower. Crude is hitting 100 buck resistence here. If we are drawing similarities to 2008, crude was the last thing to top out. The ten year is sitting above 2% by a few ticks. Hard for me to imagine the stock market can continue higher with rates close to 2%.