Skip to footer

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.

|
Richard Drew/AP
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.

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.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Debbie Downers: The Street's day traders languish in slow market
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Reformed-Broker/2012/0627/Debbie-Downers-The-Street-s-day-traders-languish-in-slow-market
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe