A 10-Second Guide To What Traders Are Chatting About This Morning

We summarize in bullets:

• EU markets off a touch. Spreads wider on news that Italy will miss growth targets.
• Markets closed in the UK.
• Dollar index showing strength. Yields unchanged.
• Not much stress in markets related to situation in Israel/Syria.
• Lots of talk about the strong defensive stocks. From Bloomberg: : “Defensive shares such as JNJ and PG have rallied 19 percent on average in 2013, the best start since 1991, and exceeded cyclical stocks by more than 8 percentage points last month, the most since October 1998. As long as the economy isn’t shrinking, a gap of that size has presaged rallies of 10 percent in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index since 1973”