Yahoo Finance

U.S. stocks rising for a third day in a row, despite souring consumer confidence. Yahoo! Finance's Jared Blikre joins us now with the trading day takeaways. Jared?

Well, thank you. I think investors are trying to figure out what this rally means. Is it just a dead cat bounce? Is it buy high, sell low? Which is what you don't want to do, by the way, but let me just skip over to the S&P 500 so I can kind of lay out the technicals here. This is a six-month chart, and I know it's a little hard to see, but I'm going to put the 200-day moving average on it, and you can see yesterday, on Monday, we closed above on that big up day. Now the problem with that, and by the way, today it has stopped just short of the January lows. Uh so we got another technical hurdle here to clear. But one thing I didn't like about yesterday was it was on low volume. And volume is something that's often misinterpreted, but suffice to say we are not in the clear just yet with respect to this rally. And it's interesting, I was talking to Victoria Fernandez of Crossmark Global Securities, and this is on Stocks and Translation episode coming out Thursday, I believe, and she was talking about some of these tendencies and how you want to buy low and sell high. Let's take a listen.

I think the biggest mistake, and we see it often and we try to help people understand, we said earlier, don't chase the markets when it's this volatile issue going on. Clients tend to want to sell when things are low and buy when things are high, right? The opposite of the old adage.

That's opposite.

That's exactly right. So we want people to take cautious approaches to their investments, really think things through and have a consistent approach where you're not making knee-jerk reactions to headlines that are out there in the market.

Consistency, steady mind, all that good stuff. We are approaching month end, by the way, of course. Anything on my radar as an investor I should have my eye on?

You bet. We actually have pension flows in the mix here. So at the end of every month, at the end of every quarter, sometimes pension funds kind of find themselves themselves off kilter, and they have to rebalance. And there's estimated that there's going to be $85 billion in pension fund flows at the end of this month. So basically from now until next Monday, and sometimes these are front run and it's a little bit, it's not as though they they can't do it anytime, but nevertheless, this is supposed to be the greatest imbalance that we've seen since basically March of 2020. And that was a huge deal in the markets. That was, of course, at the pandemic lows. That was the rebound. I remember that time, and pension fund flows were a factor back then. So is it going to lead to a lot of buying this week? Well, $85 billion from pension funds, another $20 billion from target funds, that's $105 billion. If you're keeping track, that's a lot of money. So that could make a difference that could sway things, and we'll see if we find that in the footprints of the market here.

Any downsides to the data you're seeing?

Yeah, so we are heading into earnings season, and ahead of that, corporations, they stop doing buybacks, and they are in the blackout window right now, so you are losing the corporate buyback bid. The good news there is that in a few weeks, basically a month, you will have that buy big buyback bid back. Try saying that five times fast. Uh but suffice to say, there's a decent amount of buying that could be done into month end.

All right, final Jared Blikre point.

Let's do this. Dr. Copper for the win. I've been talking about Dr. Copper, that is copper futures, in in the US on the CME exchange, finally reaching record highs, and it's taken a while. They've just been crawling higher. But there's the year-to-date commodities, HG equals F is up 30.9%. That is the top of our board. Let me put the one-year chart on, so you can see. You got to look at the candlesticks to see the intraday, but finally we crossed the threshold there up 5.22 or up to 5.22 dollars per ton, per pound. Sorry, I don't know the units there, but nevertheless, let me show you the max chart here, and I'll put some lines on it so you can see better. This is definitely the highest price since the beginning of the century. A lot of this has to do with tariffs, traders and investors front running some of those tariffs, but there's also institutional demand. China's coming back this year, could be a perfect storm for higher copper prices globally, and there's a there's also a very big steep decline or steep spread between US copper and London copper, so there's that dynamic as well.

We'll keep watching.

All right, buddy. Appreciate it.

Thanks.