Friends Well, as we indicated on Friday, the press got quite worked up about the Dow closing over 14,000 on Friday. Baron’s magazine couldn’t stop patting themselves on the back, reminding us that they have been bullish and calling for this advance. Pundits and...
Friends Buckle up. We have a lot to talk about. For starters, we got a bevy of economic data this morning including the jobs report. The government reported that the economy produced 157,000 new jobs in January, which was a little shy of expectations, but the previous...
Friends If the January indicator is intact, we are in for a good year in stocks. You know the saying, as January goes – so does the year. Well, as we have seen in recent years, that isn’t always the truth, but one can’t deny it was a good January for stocks. It’s true...
Friends We had a lot of economic news to deal with today. For starters, we got our first look at 4th quarter GDP. Yikes! We were expecting growth of about 1% (not good, but at least remaining positive), but what we got was a negative .10%. Not a total disaster, and it...
Friends Stocks continue to advance as earnings reports are good enough, economic news is at least not too bad, and cash seems to need somewhere to go. The bulls are charging toward 14,000 on the Dow and the S&P seems to have cleared 1500 without much resistance....
Friends Today had all the feel of a backing and filling day. Once again I would give the nod to the bulls. The bears just can’t seem to generate any downside momentum. A great example of where money seems to want to flow is today Caterpillar announced a less than...
Friends If you have a chance, watch the cat fight between two hedge fund titans, Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman, on CNBC’s air today (their web site has it). It was unreal, and led me to wonder whether managing client’s money was as important to them as their egos....
Friends Despite an absolute drubbing of shares of Apple, stocks continue to climb higher. No, Apple’s earnings weren’t all that bad, but the same analysts that were falling all over themselves predicting a price target of $1000 per share, are now insisting that...
Friends Both Google and IBM delivered very nice earnings reports after the close yesterday and helped spur the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a new five year high and just hundreds of points shy of all-time highs. After the close today we will get the earnings of...
Friends Though this is a short week, it is chocked full of earnings and should set a tone for the next few weeks. So far, though we are only a fraction of the way through earnings season, stocks are reacting relatively well to both good and bad reports. What I mean by...
Friends Despite the consumer sentiment number coming in a little soft this morning, stocks continued to roll to new 5 year highs. Again, the most hated bull market of all time continues to confound the bears and amaze those who have been spectators on the sidelines...
Friends An old adage on Wall Street has been “never sell a quiet market”. Guess what- we have had a very quiet market (albeit with an upward bias) in terms of volatility in the past few weeks. Well today, despite an awful Philly Fed number which measures manufacturing...
Friends Markets continue to trade in a relatively calm manner as we find ourselves past the halfway point in the year’s first month. Intraday volatility is way down as traders seem to be somewhat disinterested in taking any big stance before the bulk of this earnings...
Friends Stocks continue to confound the bears, as despite less than stellar economic reports this morning, attempts to sell the market were met with buying. The retail sales report was not bad, but the Empire Manufacturing survey was not good. Add to this a...
Friends Don’t look now, but the year is not off to a very good start for stocks. For whatever reason one wants to assign to it, the market seems to be very tentative at the moment. Perhaps it’s not a selling spree, but it sure doesn’t seem like buyers have much of an...
