Friends
Another difficult day for stocks in this initial week of trading of 2016. Overnight we had news of the nut case in North Korea testing what was claimed to be an H-bomb. In addition continued currency devaluation in China and the seemingly never ending plunge in oil prices weighed heavily on investor’s minds as the trading day began. Stocks dropped from the opening bell well over 200 Dow points and remained in decidedly negative territory for the entire session.
By the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 252 points to finish the day at 16,906. The S&P 500 was down 26 points to close at 1990. Gold was up $15 to trade at $1093, while oil was down a whopping $2 to trade at $33.97 per barrel WTI.
Interestingly enough there was actually some good domestic economic news as the ADP Employment private payroll number came in much better than expected, and the non-manufacturing ISM number wasn’t terrible (not terrible is the new “good” nowadays). As I mentioned yesterday, pessimism is riding high at the moment. We’ll just take it a day at a time and not take our eye off the ball (our long term goals). Let’s see if things begin to settle just a little bit over the next couple of trading sessions.
Have a nice evening everyone.
