Friends Well, as they try to put the pieces back together on the east coast, and our hearts are with them, the markets did get open and stocks did trade on this Halloween day. The powers that be really wanted to get the exchanges open today, and with a whole lot of...

Friends On the economic front, the consumer confidence number held steady which was somewhat encouraging, while the first look at 3rd quarter GDP (remember they revise it two more times) showed the economy growing at 2% which is a little higher than expected (don’t be...

Friends The markets were quiet today, as traders seem to be digesting all the earnings reports received this week as well as waiting for Apple and Amazon to report after the close. On the economic front, the durable goods number and the weekly unemployment claims both...

Friends With the election less than two weeks away and having been asked by many of you, I thought I might take a moment to discuss the market ramifications depending on who wins the White House. First let’s assume that President Obama wins a second term. Many of you...

Friends Yesterday the stock market was able to recover from an over 100 point loss. Today we weren’t so lucky. Fueled by more anemic earnings reports and anxiety about the pending fiscal cliff, stocks were down from the opening bell to the closing bell. There were a...

Friends Earnings season is at its peak this week and so far our concerns about earnings growth slowing have been verified. Unfortunately companies are struggling to meet or beat expectations both on the top line and the bottom line, and future guidance has been...

Friends It was 25 years ago today.  The stock market crashed. I remember the details like it was yesterday. I was in my third year in the business, parked in the “bullpen” at the Merrill Lynch office in Clayton, Missouri ( a suburb of St. Louis). We had these little...

Friends Well it looks like everyone got so caught up in the 25th anniversary of the 1987 stock market crash, that they wanted to do a re-enactment today. Hey this aint the Civil War- we don’t need no re-enactment. In reality the string of lousy earnings reports over...

Friends Today’s market was dominated by a mistaken earnings release by Google. Instead of coming after the close, Google’s earnings release was mistakenly disseminated midday, and the details were not good. Having missed the analyst’s estimates by a mile, the stock...

Friends While the business media were in a frenzy over the resignation/firing of Citibank’s CEO Vikram Pandit this morning, the bulls quietly, while no one was looking, took the market on a nice advance. Just a day after Citibank announced a better than expected...

Friends Stocks began the week on a good note today, as after an uneventful first hour of trading, shares began to rise and by midday we had ourselves a hundred point gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  By the close, stocks were able to hold on to most of their...

Friends I’m not sure if the market actually closed today, or did it just fall asleep? The week ended with two days of very little volatility and very little interest from the trading community. Two major banks reported earnings this morning, one (J P Morgan) was a...

Friends Stocks fell for the 4th day in a row, and the sell-off keeps getting a little worse each day. The culprit today seemed to be the mixed signals that we have already gotten at the beginning of earnings season. We had a couple of early beats by the likes of YUM...