Good News: Customer Service Fixed The Stock Market.

Yes, customer service? I’d like to report an outage in the magic money machine.

Whatever went “wrong” on Tuesday went “right” on Wednesday as stocks surged and the Dow broke above 26,000 again.

Apparently, someone called customer support yesterday when the rally faded.

The S&P couldn’t quite get there on a 1% gain and as we’ve noted on too many occasions to count, 1% in either direction is a rare thing these days:

“Fuck yo’ targets“…

Semis surged:

Fund managers are OW to the tune of 1.1 standard deviations above the long-term average:

Goldman fell after Q4 results showed a 50% decline in FICC revenue which, while not surprising, wasn’t exactly comforting either. As expected, Chavez flagged commodities as the biggest driver of underperformance last year (recall the news on that from Tuesday).

Mercifully for the dollar, Treasurys sold off into the close which helped the greenback recover a bit after it (again) gave up early gains – or maybe the dollar recovered and that pushed yields higher. Chicken-egg. Whatever.

The BoC hiked rates and although it was generally seen as dovish (basically this is just improving econ versus NAFTA uncertainty), the dollar’s knee-jerk gains against the loonie faded.

Here’s Goldman’s take for whatever that’s worth:

The BoC hiked rates by 25bp at today’s monetary policy meeting, its first hike since September of last year, and maintained its cautious policy stance. Governor Poloz said in his press conference today that “we say we are–and we are–data dependent, and there’s no question that the data on balance since October have been stronger than our base case.” With that in mind, the Bank emphasized the significant uncertainties facing the economy–particularly with regards to NAFTA–but felt that a rate hike was warranted. The outcome of the meeting was broadly in line with our expectations, and we maintain our forecast for three additional rate increases this year, as well as our 12m target for USDCAD of 1.20. However, in light the still-cautious tone from the Bank, we do not see particularly attractive risk/reward in the Loonie from current levels.

New post-Brexit high for the pound above 1.39:

Also worth noting, several ECB officials have come out over the past couple days to try and talk the euro back. The single currency’s relentless rise imperils the European equity rally and also casts significant doubt on the ECB’s ability to rollback stimulus and, over the longer-term, hit their inflation target.  “Recent euro appreciation is not helping,”  Nowotny told reporters in Vienna on Wednesday, adding that “the main reason for the recovery has been export driven and in that context of course also the exchange rate is something that has to be observed.”

In the crypto space, the carnage continued with Bitcoin very nearly breaking below $9,000 at one point depending on where you get your space token prices. Technical analysts are going to go ahead and pretend like the problem here is arbitrary lines on a chart and not the fact that this is an egregious pyramid scheme and therefore destined to go to zero like Herbalife would have done if it weren’t for Uncle Carl. On the off chance those arbitrary lines mean anything to you, the 100-DMA is what everyone’s watching. Of course because prices vary, so do the charts, but here’s a rough approximation:

Dick knows this is a fraud:

 

Oh, and remember that “fake news” about China reconsidering its allocation to Treasurys? Yeah, well after the bell we got this:

• CHINA’S U.S. TREASURY HOLDINGS FALL TO LOWEST LEVEL SINCE JULY

Finally, for your moment of zen, we go to Sarah Huckabee Sanders to tell us why, if there’s a government shutdown, it has nothing to do with President “stable genius” and everything to do with, well, with anyone but him:

Press Sec. Sanders tells @CeciliaVega that if a government shutdown happens "the blame, the fault will all lie at one place"—congressional Democrats. pic.twitter.com/5BKVOJYQUc

— ABC News (@ABC) January 17, 2018