Thursday August 16th was a wild day in the stock market. It marked the culmination of almost a month’s worth of massive selling. The Dow was down more than 300 points at one point before, miraculously and for no apparent…
The market had been trading up strongly today and then, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, about an hour and a half ago, around 1:45am EST, it started to drop precipitously (Intraday Chart). As you can see from…
“The stock market’s reaction tells you it is assuming the Fed will do what needs to be done. There’s nothing in the minutes that precludes another rate cut.” – James Glassman (subscription required), Senior Economist, JP Morgan The Fed’s minutes…
3rd quarter earnings “officially” kick off today with Alcoa announcing earnings after the close. Analysts are expecting just 1% profit growth for the S&P 500, down from about 4% a week ago, according to this Investor’s Business Daily article. Financials…
“It’s amazing, the difference in six weeks.” – Alan Lancz, Director, Lancz Global Well it finally happened: The S&P took out it’s all time closing high closing today at 1558. The Dow is like 20 points below its record close from Monday. Financials are…
Homebuilders have been on fire this week mainly, it seems, on the strength of a Monday upgrade by Citigroup Homebuilder Analyst Stephen Kim. Check out the moves in some of these builders (as of Fri 10/5, 1pm EST): KB Home…
This morning Merrill Lynch (MER) announced an estimated $5.5 billion in writedowns ($4.5 million related to mortgage backed securities and $1 billion to leveraged loan commitments) and forecast a loss for the quarter of up to 50 cents per share…
This morning The Bureau of Labor Statistics came out and said the economy added 110,000 jobs in September and revised the August number from -4,000 to 89,000. Given what a big reaction the market had to the bad jobs report…
An interesting chart from BeSpoke Investment Group shows more than 80% of the companies in the S&P Financials trading above their 50 day moving average. That’s a higher level than we’ve seen since before the emergence of problems with subprime…
“When the Fed said it would do all it takes to prevent a financial crisis, the market reaction was: ‘What’s to worry about? It’s all good’. That’s pretty much the way we feel.” – Linda Duessel (subscripton required), Market Strategist, Federated…