Stock futures sold off hard in response overnight. However, an odd divergence materialized as an early market sell-off on Thursday turned into a small rally as all four of the indexes shown below closed in positive territory. Tomorrow, Trump's deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz will hit 35 minutes after the market opens after which the President is threatening to bomb Iranian oil and energy infrastructure, but already Trump is starting to walk this back a bit. As he ranted over the weekend, " "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the (expletive deleted) Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell." 
Perhaps the now proverbial TACO Trade is in store this week, but we will not know for sure until we get there. Nevertheless, it should all make for a very chaotic, if not interesting, trading week. For the most part, the extreme uncertainty pervading the current market environment keeps us on the sidelines with respect to issuing reports, whether on the long or short side.On Wednesday, however, we put out Pocket Pivot Reports on two big-stock techs, SanDisk (SNDK) and Western Digital Corp. (WDC) as they were both on track to post potential pocket pivots early in the day. However, by the close, SNDK's volume tapered off, missing the required levels to qualify as a pocket pivot while WDC ended the day with sufficient volume for a bona fide pocket pivot. However, SNDK, posted an MAU&R at the 50-dma on Tuesday and then shook out along 20-dema support, as did WDC, on Thursday. These may be names to watch as potential long trades if something positive develops in Iran or the TACO Trade materializes this week. Otherwise, should they break 50-dma support they would of course morph into potential short-sale targets at that point.
This remains a difficult market for both short-term traders and certainly for intermediate-term investors as the news flow can change things on a dime, and drastically so. We continue to believe that cash is king until the situation clarifies as the War in Iran has the potential to escalate or deescalate significantly in April.The Market Direction Model (MDM) remains on a SELL signal.