Evening Briefing for July 30th

* MARKET THEMES FROM THURSDAY - On the heels of Wednesday's range bound performance, in which stocks stayed above their overnight lows despite overall selling of risk assets, Thursday started strong out of the gate, reaching the R2 level before the open. We moved to new bull highs on good volume before buying moderated and late selling retraced a good portion of the early gains. The NASDAQ futures were particularly weak in the afternoon; oil was strong on the session; gold closed off its highs; the dollar closed off its lows vs. euro (but has since fallen back thus far in overnight trade); and a favorable auction took 10-year yields off their highs by the close. With 2723 new 20-day highs and only 182 new lows among NYSE, NASDAQ, and ASE issues, the market was clearly strong; note, however, that this is actually fewer new highs than we saw on 7/23. I will be watching closely for signs of deterioration in the new highs; more problematic for the bulls would be a meaningful expansion of 20-day lows. That hasn't happened to this point.

* OVERSEAS/OVERNIGHT NUMBERS: 3:00 AM CT - Italy, PPI; 4:00 AM CT - Italy, CPI; EU, consumer prices; EU, unemployment; 7:30 AM CT - Canada, GDP.

* EARNINGS: CVX, GAS, PKD, WY

* WORTH READING:

-- The value of cutting losses on low opportunity trading days;

-- Thanks to Gustavo for key TraderFeed posts in Portuguese;

-- The TradeOrderFlow blog makes nice use of video to illustrate day trades;

-- Economy tanking, but stocks rising and other good market reads;

-- Volume can be deceptive and more excellent updates;

-- Ray Barros is offering webinar sessions on the habits of success with free previews.
.