Forget Today 28/2/2011

The Australian Stock Exchange shut down today at 2.48 p.m due to some technical failure. Just as the market looked like going positive. The All Ordinaries (XAO) was down at that time only 2.3 points to 4922.6.

The Nikkei was down below zero until about 1.00 pm their time and finished up +0.92%. At the time of writing, the Hang Seng was up 1.5% (near closing time).

When the ASX shut down the Advance/Decline Ratio was 1.05:1. Relatively flat, but still on the positive side. The AdvancingVol/DecliningVol Ratio was a bullish 2.18:1.

If Australia had replicated its peers in Asia (highly likely), our market would have finished solidly in the green today. Nothing spectacular, but solid.

The two most important trading periods of the day (and the highest volume) are the first hour and the last hour. In the first hour, the nervous nellies often dominate, and in the last hour, the cool heads (read institutional traders) dominate. So we missed the last hour of trading today.

Now we'll wait for the overnight action, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa.

Meanwhile, back in the Land of the Bogs (Ireland) an historic election has taken place. The Guardian had this little snippet:

Bondholders face pressure from new Irish government to share cost of bailout by taking 'haircut' on sovereign debt.

That news is probably already factored into prices on the European market, as a change in the Irish government was widely expected.

More tomorrow morning.

Good luck

Red