Friends
After last week’s flurry of political activity, the markets seemed to show some signs of exhaustion today as stocks drifted in mostly negative territory for the majority of the trading session. Now that the government is back in action, we are going to get the September jobs report tomorrow morning (expectations are for about 180,000 new jobs to have been created). Yes, the report might be a little stale at this point, but at least we can begin to fill in the gaps of missing economic information that we would have received over the last couple of weeks. Of course, we will only see in time, how much damage the political sideshow caused as we move forward.
By the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 7 points to finish the day at 15,392. The S&P 500 was up a fraction to close at 1744. Gold, too, was up a fraction to trade at $1315 per ounce, while oil was down $1.59 to trade at $99.22 per barrel WTI.
Earnings season, as we observed before has been mixed, with some Corporations beating expectations while other have disappointed. It looks like this season is going to have to be analyzed company by company as opposed to any sweeping generalizations. Now that we have the political wrangling behind us for at least a short period of time, we’ll focus on how this earnings season and economic data affect stocks and bonds in the weeks ahead. We’ll keep you informed.
Have a nice evening everyone.
