Trading was quiet on Wall Street and finished with an inside day...

Trading was quiet on Wall Street and finished with an inside day - almost all trading was within the boundaries of the previous day. Of the nine sectors that make up their market, three were up and six were down. Financials were in minus territory again. Treasury yields eased further.

I mentioned yesterday that I thought it looked like the Brazil stock market had finally topped. Fell 3.7% overnight. I doubt we will see this peak exceeded again in this cycle. The Brazilian disaster is still pushing the iron ore price higher. It is now getting back up to around the top formed in this market in February/March 2017. Think it might meet a bit of resistance around this area.

US dollar strengthened once more which put pressure back on commodities. Looks like gold does want to go back to the targets I gave earlier - $1300 and perhaps $1290. However, the weaker Australian Dollar certainly put a floor under the Australian gold price. Makes it a difficult week for analysis when the Chinese market is closed.

In the light of the latest views put forth by the Reserve Bank, I got to wondering how many people work there and add in Treasury as well. Perhaps a thousand - perhaps many more. This got me to pondering why someone, anyone, could not see what interest rates were shouting at us for quite some time that things were not as rosy as we were being told. Now after all this time we get a downgrade of the economic forecast. Just amazing. If a Simple Little Chartist could see it, why couldn't some of these probably very highly paid people see it. A bit depressing really isn't it. Maybe they should become members of the Hot Copper family.....