Friends As I mentioned the other day, everyone seemed to be bored with the lack of movement that we saw in stocks during the month of August. Traders were looking for a little action. Well, as the saying goes "be careful what you wish for." After Friday's mess, stocks...
Friends Today's Fed official's comments were a little less hawkish, so Friday's decline and today's preopening weakness vanished in a flurry of buying. All this nonsense will be put to rest for good come next week when the FOMC actually meets and decides whether to...
Friends Everyone has been bellyaching that stocks haven’t moved (shown any volatility) for months-well, we got some movement today. Unfortunately for the bulls, the selloff in stocks today was triggered by hawkish comments by a Fed Governor this morning before the...
Friends Stocks look to be taking on a slightly negative tone as we work our way into September. Nothing of any real consequence, but it appears that market participants are a little bit hesitant to add to long positions at the moment. We are still trying to determine...
Friends While the business media was obsessing over the Apple rollout of the iPhone 7 today, stocks were busy doing a whole lot of nothing. The beige book report shows modest domestic economic growth, but did show a bit of strength in wage growth (but little else in...
Friends Ok, everyone should be back from the Hamptons now and trading volume and interest should pick up. Today, we did see a bit of volatility as stocks spent time in both positive and negative territory. By the close, the bulls had the upper hand, but I wouldn’t...
Friends Well, it appears we had a goldilocks type of jobs report this morning. Oh, it disappointed on some levels, as the 151,000 new jobs created was less than the 180,000 or so expected, and the 0.1% increase in average hourly earnings was somewhat anemic, but...
Friends Stocks drifted in decidedly negative territory for just about all of today’s trading session until a small recovery kicked in during the last hour of trading. There was very little in the way of any news catalysts (although auto sales were a bit disappointing,...
Friends Stocks closed the month on somewhat of a sour note, and when all was said and done the market averages experienced little movement in August. The ADP employment report came in about as expected with 177,000 new private sector payrolls added in August. Of...
Friends The bulls weren’t able to keep yesterday’s momentum going as stocks slumped into negative territory early in the trading session and drifted there for the balance of the day. On the economic front the consumer confidence is booming as measured by the...
Friends With help from financial shares, stocks traded higher today right from the opening bell. Most of the gains occurred in the first half hour of trading, but at least the bulls were able to hold onto those gains as the trading session wore on. Pundits increased...
Friends Leading into Janet Yellen’s speech at Jackson Hole, Wyoming tomorrow, today’s better than expected durable goods order showed signs of life in the manufacturing sector. Of course, not this nor anything else seemed to be of any interest to traders. Stocks did...
Friends Home prices inched up, although less than expected, but even with better pricing, existing home sales were much weaker than expected. Maybe buyers want new homes as evidenced by yesterday’s robust new home sales number. Whatever the case, housing has been this...
Friends The bulls tried to rally the forces today, and for a brief moment this morning, we did have stocks parked nicely in positive territory. But the rally faded quietly for the remainder of the trading session leaving us with modest gains in the market averages,...
Friends The trading week begins just as the last couple have ended-no volatility, no volume and a whole lot of nothing going on. Fed Governors continue to give speeches as we work our way towards Jackson Hole later this week, but at this point if it doesn’t come out...
