Sentiment

Stock market averages slipped early Thursday after the Labor Department said weekly jobless claims fell by 6,000 to 462,000 in the first week of March. Economists were looking for a decline to 460,000. Continuing claims for the end of February increased to 4.558 mln from 4.521 mln and more than the 4.5 mln economists were expecting. Separate data showed the Trade Balance narrowing to $37.3 billion in January, down from $39.9 billion in December thanks to falling imports. Economists were looking for a wider $41 billion deficit.

Beyond the disappointing data, there hasn't been much news to guide the action and the market averages have been rangebound for a fourth time this week. With an hour left to trade, both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the NASDAQ have bounced back from early losses and are flat. The CBOE Volatility Index (.VIX) is also unchanged 18.87. Trading in the options market remains active, however, with about 6.5 million calls and 5.6 million puts traded so far.

Brick charts can make visualizing support, resistance and trends easier to interpret than daily price charts, by filtering out some of the noise in price fluctuations.

The traditional name is “Renko” charts, which was translated into English as “brick”.

Thanks to the promise of high growth, emerging market exchange traded funds have been the darlings of the investing world since the economic recovery first sprang to life. But whether it’s roundly true that emerging markets will always outperform developed ones is another question altogether.

Emerging economies have a much healthier balance sheets compared to the developed world, remarks Chris Sholto Heaton for IndexUniverse. Emerging markets should produce higher returns that reflect their greater risk and their higher GDP growth should translate into higher returns; however, GDP growth is only one component of total long-term equity returns.