Friends
After nine Mondays in a row of losses, stocks finally had a decent beginning to the week. Yes, volume was extremely light, but nevertheless with no real news to drive momentum, stocks continued late last week’s rally (although we did give most of the rally back by the close). For the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 21 points to close at 13,117. The S&P 500 made an assault on 1400 but fell back just a bit to close at 1394, up 3 points for the day. Gold was up $4 to trade at $1613 per ounce, while oil was up $.77 to trade at $92.17 per barrel WTI.
With little economic news today, let’s take a moment to wrap up earnings season. By the end of this week, we will have gotten reports from the majority of the S&P 500, and the one takeaway that we have is that revenues in general were lagging, but bottom lines still continue to hang in there. As we have said, we did have muted expectations coming into this earnings season, but in general, companies were still able to remain very profitable. For the most part, companies laid out very conservative outlooks for the coming quarters, as many indicated slowdowns around the world will continue to threaten revenues.
But in the end, stocks survived a difficult earnings season and the “sell in May and go away” strategy did not apply this year. Sure, we have many problems ahead of us, but at the moment the stock market is defying the bears and hanging in there in the face of multiple global and domestic problems. August tends to be a difficult month for markets, so we’ll see if the stocks can continue to climb a wall of worry.
We’ll let you know how the week plays out.
Have a nice evening everyone.
