All The Stars Are Aligned

Apple released their latest iPhone. The German high court paved the way for bond purchases by the ECB. The Dutch elected a pro-EU politician. Ben's Fed plan has been fully telegraphed and today's the day we hear the juicy details. The stars are aligned for a rocket ride higher.

If ever there was a day for a false breakout, this is it.

This is not my forecast, only my suspicion. I don't buy breakouts, so there is little chance of me getting caught in it.  Unless I were to short it.  Which I probably will.  With puts.

I've been in and out of calls so many times lately that I've stopped keeping track.  They've largely been scalps.  Today I will unload on any spike higher and try some puts against the tag ends of the calls which at this point are SPY 145s.

1428.98 is still the immediate stop.  Below that and the market could start having some real issues. As for the upside, there is a confluence of Fibonacci expansion targets at 1455-1458.  It doesn't have to get there to turn around.  One tick over 1439.15 could do it, but it would look cooler and would screw more people if it thrusted higher.

The market's job is to take the most amount of money from the most amount of people the most amount of the time.  It's not personal.  It's business.

With all the stars so perfectly aligned, I noticed two things this morning that I'm glad I didn't overlook.

The first is that more people are opting out of the banking system.  Since both the Washington Post and Bloomberg took this and ran nearly identical stories, I assume it's PR with a purpose.  The government does not want this happening because they can't monitor people outside the financial system.  So of course they've kicked off a fancy conference "to explore ways banks could profit by serving this population."

U.S. households without bank accounts grew by 821,000 from 2009 to 2011, pushing the so-called unbanked population to 8.2 percent of the nation’s total, according to the FDIC’s National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households.

Roughly 17 million adults are without a checking or savings account. It's spreading.

The second thing I noticed concerned real estate in two of the most expensive markets in the country, San Francisco and Manhattan.

According to MLS data, San Fran just saw a year-over-year fall in homes sold from August 2011 to August 2012 despite lower inventory.  And Bloomberg reported Manhattan Apartment Vacancy Rate Climbs After Rents Reach Record. The article noted the vacancy rate in August, when the greatest number of Manhattan leases are signed, was 1.19 percent, up from 1 percent a year earlier.

Not much yet, but the high end may have reached as high as it can bear.  With money essentially for free, with executive salaries at record levels, with the Dow and S&P at four-year highs and closing in on all-time highs, chances are when the bell gets rung for the top, it will be overlooked.

With the stars so perfectly aligned, it wouldn't take much to shake things up.