Utter chaos!

As noted by the GOP leadership: "There is no Plan B" to the TrumpDon'tCare Act. Either the GOP gets health care and takes insurance away from 24M Americans and begins to defund Medicaid or, as Trump now states "Obamacare Stays." I know – WTF? Is it possible that the GOP has purposely put forth an unpassable bill BECAUSE they realize Obamacare is too good to kill?

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Keep in mind this is just the House Vote on Health Care, which was supposed to be easy, the Senate vote is next and the changes they made in the bill could cause it to fail simply under the parliamentary rules (because they changed it to a simple majority, which caused other rules to kick in). 

If 3 GOP Senators defect, the Bill dies and, even if it passes, the Dems can tie it up in court for a long time. Since they have a 44 vote advantage in the House (10%) and can't get them in line, it's reasonable to assume they are going to have trouble with at least 5 Senators and Senators have to Represent whole states – this is a suicide mission for Republican Senators from Democratic states. It's very possible this battle will cost the GOP the Senate next year and the Senate gets to do all those fun investigations. So that's the upside on the Bill – the downside is TOTAL CHAOS!

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Of course, that may be exactly what the White House wanted because, clearly, they did not have a real Health Care plan but, much more importantly, you forgot all about Trump's false accusations that Obama tapped his phone and, even though Devin Nunes jumped on a grenade for Trump and tried to convince the American People that mentions of the Trump team in some investigations justified Trump's paranoia (destroying his own reputation in the process) - no one really fell for it but, suddenly, Health Care distracted us – how convenient!  

Yesterday, I was on the Benzinga Pre-Market Report at 8:30 and they asked me how to play the Dow and I told them (20 minutes in): "Figure 20,750 is the line that we think is going to fail – even if we rally off of what Yellen says this morning and off of the Trump vote tonight and that will then lead to a larger correction." So far, we're right on track with that prediction:

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At 11:40, in our Live Member Chat Room, I reiterated the short call, saying:

/TF is a fun short at 1,360 with tight stops above.  Good as long as /ES stays under 2,355 and /NQ under 5,375.  /YM is at 20,682 (20,666 is weak bounce, 20,750 is strong, so still lame).

20,750 was my predicition this morning for the Dow, about 20,700 on /YM.

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As you can see, we nailed it and the drop back to 29,600 paid $500 per contract before the close – not bad for a day's hard work for our Members, right? Now we are waiting PATIENTLY to see how America's patients will be treated for the next 4 years before making a new play but, on the whole, our lines are working so we'll probably keep playing them. 

As is often the case when the market is desperate for a lift, someone lifts their price target on Apple (AAPL). Today it's Instinet (I know, who?) raising their target from $135 to $165 (we have a large, bullish AAPL position, so fine with us). Durable Goods were decent at 1.7% but down from 2.3% prior and it was all aircraft as Core Goods fell 0.1% vs +0.5% expected by leading economorons. This is another indication of a soft Q1.

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 There's an OPEC meeting in Kuwait this weekend and the goal there is to keep Brent from failing the $50 mark and a failure to do so will give us another leg down in the indexes next week as the energy sector rethinks those recent gains.  Financial have also come down and will go down further, which thrills us as shorting Ultra-Long Financials (TNA) is one of our big hedges in our Short-Term Portfolio

Our favorite long of the morning is the Dollar (/DX) at 99.50 and we almost never play currencies but this seems pretty obvious, especially with BOJ's Kuroda saying  "There is no reason to withdraw the bank's massive monetary stimulus now, or raise bond yield targets, as inflation remains far from its 2% goal" – that seems pretty clear to me.