Maybe lower tomorrow, but Fed minutes will tell

Well the Dow daily pivot certainly was the key today. We opened just above it at 12,375 and aside from one brief dip below it at 2:30 PM, held above it all day. And importantly, we closed at 12,400, finally closing above the February high (the horizontal blue line in the chart).

This should signal the all-clear to advance further since there's no resistance now all the way back to the spring of 2008. But I'm not so sure. The pace of the rally from the depths of the Japan disaster has been slowing the past few days. And also note how volume has been declining for three days straight now even as the Dow has been climbing. And all three futures are lower at this hour (1:10 AM EDT) by 0.2 percent to a third of a percent for the NQ. And they've been trending lower since 7:30 this evening.

Meanwhile, the VIX is still trying to figure out where it's going. It rose today but did so on a red candle.  Although it has more room to go higher than it has to go lower from here, it doesn't really seem to have much steam behind it at these levels so there's not really much to learn from it tonight.

Oil meanwhile just continues to grind higher and basically seems to be replaying the spring of 2008 all over again.  If history repeats itself, we have about five more weeks of oil speculation before it tops out.  We'll see.

I'm inclined to say that the Dow could go lower tomorrow but since tomorrow is a day when the Fed minutes come out, there's no forecast tonight. I have no way of knowing what they're going to say, and what they say invariably drives the entire market regardless of whatever else may be going on at that time. So tonight is just going to be one of those watch and wait times.