Friends Good economic data out of China overnight, along with a pretty good weekly jobless claims number, seemed to attract some buyers as stocks moved to a quick 70 point gain in the Dow in early trading. Unfortunately, the buyers exhausted themselves early and by...

Friends Traders (at least those not on vacation) seem to be focused on when the Fed will begin the tapering process. Again, the tapering process (lowering the amount of securities being purchased on a monthly basis) is not taking the punch bowl away. It is simply...

Friends Where were the buyers today? On another light day of trading stocks spent the session in negative territory as expectations that the Fed will use the somewhat positive economic data points (all but the employment report last Friday), to begin the tapering...

Friends After last week’s plethora of economic news, traders seemed lethargic this morning at the opening of trading. Stocks drifted into negative territory despite a nice ISM non-manufacturing number released at 9:00 am our time. Not much really happened the rest of...

Friends So much for that whisper number. The government jobs data was released this morning as there were 162,000 new jobs created last month and the unemployment rate dropped to 7.4%. The jobs number was a bit shy of what traders were expecting, but not so bad as to...

Friends We have a lot to talk about today. On the economic front the weekly jobless claims number came in at a very nice 326,000 new claims, quite a bit better than the expected 345,000. The PMI Manufacturing Index was also better than expected with new orders,...