January 22nd Market Recap

The US equity market surged today following the ECB announcement. Earlier this morning, the ECB stated that they’ll be buying $60 billion of asset-backed securities and covered bonds, on a monthly basis until September 2016. It took some time for the market to fully digest the news. In fact, the S&P 500 went negative during the day. However, it closed up, over 31 points, to 2063.15.

With that said, the VIX sold off hard, down nearly 13% and closing at 16.40.

Gold continued it’s upward momentum today. It’s gone from 1228.31 to 1301.60 per ounce, over the last five trading days.

The energy market continues to stay volatile. Implied volatility in USO is near 52-wk highs.

It seemed that nearly every stock was bid today. Someones that shined were: eBay Inc. +7.05%, Google Inc. +3.16%, Amazon Inc. + 4.40%, FXCM +33%

In the after hours, Starbucks caught a bid after their earnings release, up over 4% at the time of this writing.

On the options side, we saw large bullish flow in POST, IACI, RHI and BKD. Interestingly, we saw some bullish option activity in GIS yesterday, which is in the same space as POST.

It will be interesting to see if the positive momentum in the equity market continues or if the volatility will come back. Thus far, January has a lot more volatile than most traders expected.