Market Update 12:44pm “there is a buyers strike” $SPX

• Market Update – stocks saw some brief strength at the open but have drifted lower ever since; the sp500 is off ~6-8 points heading into the afternoon.  Trends are very quiet owing to the holiday (and the World Cup) as volumes and attendance are both on the light side.
• Once again, there is a buyers strike on the desk, w/no one really interested in making large long moves, esp. heading into the long holiday weekend (the only buying has been from short covering).  That said, it still seems like the heavy selling pressure of last week and earlier this week is exhausted (something that we started to see yesterday as well) and there aren’t a lot of shorts looking to press things or add new positions (but the absence of buyers if allowing the small selling that is occurring to dictate the tape’s direction).
•  On the fundamental front, the theme today remains the same: economic readings falling short of consensus expectations.  The BLS jobs reading showed private sector adds coming in under expectations (along w/a revision lower to May and importantly, hours + wages came in light as well - these last two numbers have been showing some improvement in recent months and people viewed them as an encouraging leading indicator). 
• The latest ERCI index came out Fri morning and fell further (the weakness in this index has received a lot of attention of late) - the Weekly Leading Index slipped to 122.2 in the latest week (from 122.9). Finally, the factory orders was light too (it fell 1.4% vs. the St looking for  a0.5% decline).  All of these eco readings were out in the morning though and there wasn’t anything that seemed to “happen” at ~11:15am (aside from Europe starting to close) to explain the drop in the tape (other than light volume drift w/no buyers). 
• Technically, there really aren’t a ton of “big” levels (1020 is being eyed and the low on Thurs was 1010) while the the sp500 "death cross" officially occurred today (the 50day slightly falls under the 200dayMA).