Debbie Downers: The Street's day traders languish in slow market
They say never short a dull market. Joshua Brown never obsesses over one either. His team's not forcing any trades or making moves just for the sake of making moves. They're spending time on administrative stuff, client work and lots of research.
Trader Jason Harper works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in this June 2012 file photo. Wall Street's sluggishness has many day traders languishing in a painfully slow market environment.
Richard Drew/AP
I talk to guys on serious trading desks around the city, the consensus is they've never seen things this dead in their entire careers. "It's like August started in June," my friend Joe tells me. "Nothing is crossing, no one is doing anything at this point."
I think seasonality only explains part of it, there's also this Eurofail Summit happening on Friday and the fact that we're in this between-earnings-seasons lull. Other than biotechs and nat gas strength, there is also very little working thematically.
We have a few core holdings flirting with new all-time highs (WMT, XBI, BRK-B, V) and a few that just cannot get any traction at all (Our Emerging Markets play, DEM, is just awful here but thankfully it has a yield while it languishes). Nothing new is popping up on our screens that we can get very excited about.
They say never short a dull market. I say never obsess over one either - we're not forcing any trades here or making moves just for the sake of making moves. We're spending our time on administrative stuff, client work and lots of research.
I don't mind.