Sense on Cents

What’s leading the market both up and down?

Regular readers here at Sense on Cents are fully aware of my focus on the U.S. dollar as the primary driver of our markets over the course of the last half year. This past summer, the BRIC nations regularly railed on our greenback as the international reserve currency. Japan jumped on that bandwagon, as well.

The pressure on the greenback supported by the Fed’s easy money policy served as the fuel that launched our markets from the intermediate pullback experienced in early July.

Check out the patterns in the U.S. Dollar Index versus the movement in the S&P 500 since early July. These indexes are almost mirror images of each other. While the order of magnitude is not exact, the direction is very highly correlated.

I certainly believe this correlation will continue and rest assured active traders on Wall Street are watching this relationship closely as well. In fact, what happened overnight? Equity markets traded off as the U.S. Dollar Index continued to firm. (more…)