Fully “Fixed” Friday – Extend and Pretend Edition

All fixed! Greece is getting another $229Bn at 3.5% with about 30 years to pay it from the EU (ie. Germany and France) and private bond-holders will share about 1/3 of the pain by " voluntarily " renegotiating their own notes.  Sounds like a really great offer, right?  BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!  Another $630Bn of already promised emergency aid has now been places into a very slushy fund that will now allow the EU to throw money at any nation that so much as sneezes – WHETHER OR NOT THEY ASK FOR ASSISTANCE.  This will allow them to play economic Whack-A-Mole, putting out all the little Euro-zone fires until that money runs out (about 6 months at the EU’s current burn rate). All this fantastic news from Europe has sent the Dollar down to test the 74 line and that was down from 75.37 just ahead of yesterday’s open and that’s a 1.8% drop so we would expect our indexes to go up at least 1.8% – BUT – none of them did.  In fact, the Nasdaq only gained 0.72% and the Russell was up 1.07% and the Dow was up 1.21% and the S&P was up 1.35%.   The NYSE, which had been our perennial laggard, did the best yesterday – gaining a close, but still no cigar 1.57%.   Will we make it up today or is this an indication that things may not be quite so good as they seem?  After the close yesterday, I did a news round-up for our Members and there is still plenty to worry about and we took a stab at some SPY Weekly (today) $135 puts at .79 for our aggressive $25K Portfolio on the off-chance they "fix" the US debt ceiling and accidentally make the Dollar strong again.  At the moment, we are still playing our short lines in the futures, where we’ve been scalping nickels and dimes since my 3:23 am Alert to Members, where I said:   I like shorting the Futures here:  S&P (/ES) at 1,346, Nas (/NQ) 2,415, Dow (/YM) 12,720 and Rut (/TF) 842.6 – as long as 74.20 hold on the Dollar, we should get a bit of a sell off so these are levels to look for as the Dollar heads back over that line but we can scale into position between 75.20 and 75.10 but, below that, too dangerous!   Oil is good …