Market participants (and sports fans) are coming to grips today with history repeating itself.  To wit, another weekend has come and gone and Greece has still not agreed to bailout terms with its creditors; meanwhile, the New York Giants have once again beaten the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

The former matters more to futures traders this morning, although the latter will certainly strike a chord with market historians today as well.

Currently, the S&P futures are down five points and are trading 0.5% below fair value.  A burgeoning sense of concern that negotiations in Greece could unravel, as political leaders there are reportedly against any further austerity measures, has cast a pall on sentiment following Friday's inspiring rally.

Still, given the scope of recent gains in the U.S. equity market, reasonably well-behaved markets today in Europe and Asia, and little change in the Treasury market, the early indication is a long way from sounding the bell on a six-alarm, Greek fire.

In our estimation, the modest losses in the futures market reflect an understandable expectation that the equity market is due for some profit taking, regardless of what is going on in Greece.

That is not to say that what is happening with Greece -- or, rather, what is not happening -- is not important.  It's just that the futures losses don't measure up to the gravity of an outcome that could entail a disorderly default.

The developments in Greece will be watched closely this week.  Other items sure to occupy the market's attention include the following:

• Earnings results from 66 S&P 500 companies
• Interest rate meetings held by the ECB and Bank of England (Thursday)
• Trade reports from the U.S. and China (Friday)
• The auction of 3-year, 10-year, and 30-year Treasury securities and
• Commentary from several Fed officials, including Fed Chairman Bernanke who will appear before the Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday

Similarly, participants will continue to watch closely how the market responds to selling interest.  Thus far, the prevailing approach has been to buy on weakness.  Sellers, frankly, haven't really even been able to gain much momentum in 2012.  Since the start of the year, the S&P 500 has increased in 16 of the 23 trading sessions.  The largest decline in the seven losing sessions has been just 0.6%.

Interestingly, the latest sentiment data from the American Association of Individual Investors revealed a drop in bullish sentiment (to 43.8% from 48.4%) and a rise in bearish sentiment (to 25.1% from 18.9%).  With sentiment being a contrarian indicator, that shift is noteworthy in that it could be regarded as a sign that any pullbacks will continue to be modest barring some exogenous shock.

On a related note, fans of the New England Patriots were no doubt shocked by the manner in which Super Bowl XLVI was settled in favor of the Giants.  That is a tough pill to swallow, but hopefully the Super Bowl indicator will help things go down a little easier.

History has shown that an original NFL team -- which the New York Giants are -- winning the Super Bowl has accurately predicted a positive year for the stock market 37 out of 45 times for an 82.2% accuracy rate. 

Then again, the Giants won in 2008 and that wasn't exactly a banner year for the S&P 500, which declined 38.5%.  That's a bit of history we'd all rather not see repeat itself.

--Patrick J. O'Hare, Briefing.com

Patrick J. O'Hare is Chief Market Analyst for Briefing Research, Briefing.com's institutional research service. To request a free trial, please email researchsales@briefing.com.