Friends
Fueled by overnight weakness in Europe led by a deteriorating situation in Spain, stocks were poised to drop right from the start of trading. Yes, after somewhat fading into the background most of last week, the European mess was front and center once again. And once again, stocks traded down on a Monday. This makes eight Mondays in a row that we have suffered market declines.
Just about one quarter of the S&P 500’s earnings have been reported to this point, and the scorecard shows that about 41% of the companies have beaten sales (revenues) estimates and about 73% have beaten earnings estimates. Of course, we must point out that expectations and estimates had already been lowered as we entered earnings season, but so far we have been able to avoid the adjective “disastrous” when addressing the results to date.
As for stocks, after being down over 200 points early in the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the day down 101 points to close at 12,721. The S&P 500 was down 12 points to finish the day at 1350. We held 1342 on the S&P, but the bulls don’t seem to be celebrating. Gold was down $5.80 to trade at $1577 per ounce, while oil dropped $3.37 to trade at $88.45 per barrel WTI.
It is another full week of earnings reports, and now it seems that Europe is kicking up again so we’ll try to keep you up to date as the week proceeds. Stay tuned.
Have a nice evening everyone.
