Friends
We had some relatively good news to start the day today. First, the vote in Germany went well which allowed the Eurozone to take a deep breath. Then we got domestic news with the 2nd quarter GDP being revised upward to 1.3% from the previously reported 1% number. Also, the weekly jobless claims number dipped under 400,000 for the first time in a while which set the tone for a nice stock rally at the beginning of the day.
Unfortunately, the rally of 250 Dow points did not last long and by 2:00 we were trading down 50 points. Stocks meandered back and forth in the last hour but eventually rallied back some to finish the day with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 143 points. The S&P 500 was up 9 points for the day to finish at 1160. Gold was relatively quiet today and near the close was trading almost unchanged. Oil was back up over a dollar to trade near the $82.50 per barrel WTI.
Tomorrow marks the end of the quarter which is going to end up being most likely the worst quarter that we have had since 2009. We’ll see if the bulls can lessen some of the damage before tomorrow’s close, but it will be nice to get the third quarter of 2011 behind us. We came into the quarter expecting stocks to have a difficult summer and unfortunately that is what transpired. We’ll give you the final numbers for the quarter after the close tomorrow.
Have a nice evening everyone.
