Unhappy first day

You have to respect the principle of Murphy's law.  When the market is afraid of recession, the economic data showed just that the economy may slip into recession.  and the market sold off on the very first day in year 2008.

The market actually opened a slightly higher but the turn around came so fast and decisive.  I just took my eye off the screen for about five seconds, when I looked it again, It was negative 70 points.  For a second, I thought my streaming quote encountered some problems..

There are a lot of culprits for the sell off.  But the sentimental of market has been negative, and any bad news just injected more fear into the market.   and oil price does not help either.

As noted by many market observers, even though we are a few hundred points away from the low of past 12 monthes, we are actually far away from the territory of over-sold.  Translation:  there are maybe more down days in the near future.

Not all is looking down though.  bond (tlt for example), commodity, gold and oil went higher.   Given the chance of more fed cut,   these are still the area one should seek shelter ( I am glad I made such observation yesterday).  

Even though, China was down, but the best bet probably is still BRIC.   Russian, for example, actually went up today.

Tomorrow, we will see ADP report, if that one turns out to be weak, it will be a long day over again.

Sometimes, what looks bad maybe a blessing in the disguise.   Today's selloff actually serves as a warning as how we should approach this year's market, especially the first half.   there are maybe a lot of bump on the road so more caution and risk averse are needed.

According to Bespoke,   just because the first day of the year is a down day does not necessarily portend the whole year is a down year,  and following table showed actually there are more up years than down year.  So, there are still hopes