Here's a nice, quick way to track intermarket themes; major props to the excellent Barchart site for these futures market heat maps. Above is the heat map for 12:50 PM CT and then the map from an hour later. The map shows how major asset classes are moving relative to one another; by tracking the map over time, you can see which groups are receiving buying and selling interest.
Note how stocks are range bound today and how we see very little in the way of directional intermarket themes on the day. Oil is down, stocks retraced earlier strength, the dollar and interest rates are little changed, and--overall--there's not much volatility to the numbers. This is one excellent tell for a range day: if correlated markets aren't trending, stocks often won't find distinctive buying or selling interest.
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