Friends
After several weeks of negative stock action, the bulls circled the wagons this week and pushed stocks higher. As mentioned yesterday, early returns on earnings season have been encouraging, albeit most of the good news has been in the banks and financial firms. Nevertheless, buyers became a little more comfortable with the prices they were seeing and decided to do some shopping. Speaking of shopping, the retail sales number released this morning was much better than expected. Most felt it would fall into negative territory given the supply and inflation headwinds, but instead showed marked improvement.
As for stocks, by the close the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 382 points to close at 35,294. The S&P 500 was up 33 points to finish the day at 4,471. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up 73 points to close at 14,897. Gold was down $29 to trade at $1,768 per ounce, while oil was up $.92 to trade at $82.23 per barrel WTI.
Since recent daily updates have been a little lengthier than usual, I haven’t worked on a quarterly piece this time around. I think we are setting the table for you on a daily basis at the moment. I’ll return to the quarterly piece next quarter. In the meantime buckle up for a busy earnings week next week. We’ll hear from dozens of regional banks as well as the likes of Procter & Gamble, Netflix, Abbott, J&J, Tesla, ATT, Intel, Dow and Schlumberger. Stay tuned.
Have a great weekend everyone.
