Tiger Woods Caused The Stock Rally, Really (DIA, SPY, QQQQ)

Today was very confusing for traders.  You had a housing number that may have incorrectly gave a feeling that housing is about to rapidly get back on its feet and we had a tame retail inflation figure via CPI that did not at all mirror the wholesale inflation via PPI yesterday.  Throw in an off-meeting tightening (a.k.a. emergency tightening) from the Fed last night in the Discount Rate but not the Fed Funds Rate…. And to top it all off we had a significant media circus event with the first public and formal Tiger Woods apology via an 11:00 AM EST press conference with no Q&A allowed after Tiger read his speech.  What if we told you that Tiger Woods was directly or indirectly responsible for the confirmation of the stock market rally today?  This is almost impossible to make up and the numbers do not lie.

Bloomberg noted, that trading on all U.S. exchanges declined during Woods’ conference, falling to 456 million shares from an average of 576.8 million during the five previous 15-minute segments.  Bloomberg also noted that the NYSE data shows that trading fell to about 100,000 shares in the minute the speech began to the lowest level of the day and then shot above 600,000 when it ended to be the highest for any period except just after exchanges opened.

Trading volume dies off to the lowest level of the day literally at the start of Tiger’s apology speech.  And it exploded to the highest level of the day right at the end of the Tiger Woods speech ending.  This chart here from Bloomberg shows the minute by minute tell of it.  And then you should pull up an intraday chart of the DJIA and S&P 500.  Almost identical…. low volume and then a rapid move up.

The trading action shows exactly the same pattern for the DIAMONDS (NYSE: DIA) and mostly the same for the SPDRs (NYSE: SPY).  Ditto for the PowerShares QQQ (NASDAQ: QQQQ).

Does this make Tiger Woods a market indicator?  Of course not.  It just happened to be Tiger Woods today.  A similar drop off of trading occurs when major media blitzes occur that are not necessarily market-related or are not geopolitical.  The markets were all opening very soft this morning after last night’s emergency Fed Discount Rate action and had effectively been in the red all morning before the Tiger Woods media event. The gains in the market today were far from stellar if you just look at the percentage gains, but frankly anything other than a down day in the market today was a win.

Have a good weekend.

JON C. OGG