Morning Market Report

The markets took another tumble yesterday. The Dow fell below 9900 as the markets extended their losing streak to two days. The strong dollar is commonly being seen as the culprit if you will for the poor stock market indices yesterday. Meanwhile, U.S. Steel and TD Ameritrade both beat earnings estimates. Consumer confidence along with the Case Schiller Home Index will be announced during the market as well. Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury will auction off a record amount of new Treasury bonds. Today, it will auction off $44 billion of 2 year treasury bonds. That will be announced after 1 PM ET.

Futures are trading roughly even. The Dow is slightly higher while both the S&P and NASDAQ futures are slightly lower. There's plenty of news during the market and so that doesn't appear to necessarily be a harbinger. The ten year U.S. Treasury bond is now at 3.55%. That's slightly better this morning however it's gained over 20 basis points in just under a week. The yield spread between the 2 and 10 year bond has grown to 2.54%. That's been on its way up since reaching a recent tightening of 2.40% earlier in the month. Crude oil took a major breather yesterday. It fell below $80 a barrel and in fact ended below $79 a barrel. It's currently trading at $78.90. That's up slightly but well of the highs it reached at the end of last week.

We have mirror images of each other in Europe and the Far East. The Far East was down nearly universally while the opposite is true in Europe. The Hang Seng was down 1.86%, the NIKKEI in Japan was down 1.45%, and the Straits Time Index in Singapore was down .81%. In Europe, the FTSE in London was up .39%, the DAX in Germany was down .03%, and the Spanish Index was up .1%.

In currencies, the Dollar is taking a bit of a breather, likely due to some profit taking, after a good day yesterday. It's off by .13% against the Euro, off by .15% against the British Pound, and off .14% against the Japanese Yen.