Turnaround Tuesday – Russia Pulls Back, Market Pulls Up

Whatever the next rumor is.

Now the market is running based on troop maneuvers in the Ukraine.  Early this morning, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had pulled back some troops from near Ukraine while noting that large-scale military maneuvers were continuing and Western officials warned that combat units were moving into forward positions.    

The announced pullback of around 10,000 (7.6%) troops, out of a force estimated to have numbered about 130,000, came amid a new round of shuttle diplomacy aimed at defusing the crisis. Moscow has warned of unspecified consequences if the U.S. and its allies reject its security demands.  While US markets are acting as if peace has broken out - In Ukraine (where they can do math), officials played down the importance of Russia’s troop announcement, saying forces could be quickly returned to Ukraine’s borders.

“We have to await confirmation from our intelligence community that this is in fact occurring,” Oleksii Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said in an interview. “I cannot say that this is a turning point. The turning point will be when the Russian Federation realizes that we are a separate state, that we have the full right to be one, and stops trying to liquidate us.”

No one is liquidating the indexes as traders leap back in at the first sign of good news. 

It’s only a blip in the grand scheme of things but it’s enough to push us back into our bullish Bounce Chart – which measures the mild retracement from the top – as opposed to our bearsh chart which measures how close we are to a 20% correction:

• Dow  36,000 to 34,200 has bounce lines of 34,560 (weak) and 34,920 (strong) 
• S&P 4,700 to 4,465 has bounce lines of 4,512 (weak) and 4,559 (strong) 
• Nasdaq 16,500 to 15,675 has bounce lines of 15,840 (weak) and 16,005 (strong) 
• Russell 2,400 to 2,080 has bounce lines of 2,144 (weak) and 2,208 (strong)

As you can see – even with the morning rally we are still very much in the red on our bullish chart and what we need to see today is the more green and the Nasdaq (/NQ), which is currently at…

Provided courtesy of Phil’s Stock World.