Friends
As we continue to wait for our politicians to come up with a plan to deal with the debt ceiling crisis and a debt reduction deal in general, we got news last night that the French and Germans came up with a “restructuring” deal for Greek debt. At least the Eurozone has settled down. Let’s hope it lasts for more than 10 minutes. Here at home, we continue to be encouraged and then disappointed by every blurb out of Washington and the markets swing with each rumor.
The story today was earnings, with Caterpillar being the most important, as their numbers were somewhat disappointing to the street. The result was a 6% drop in Caterpillar shares which contributed to the drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Dow ended the day down 43 points. The S&P 500, not as overwhelmed by Caterpillar, was actually up a point to close at 1345. Nasdaq was the big winner, up just shy of 1%, led by nice moves in technology stocks.
Other important earnings numbers were mixed as Verizon, McDonalds, Honeywell and GE seemed to balance each other out. McDonalds and GE were more on the positive side and Verizon and Honeywell were slightly disappointing to traders. All in all, earnings have been pretty good, but some stocks have not reacted well to their reports indicating that expectation had already been priced into their shares. Gold climbed back above 1600 after falling back yesterday, and oil finished slightly below $100 per barrel.
We’ll continue to wait for the politicians and look to see if anything happens this weekend. In the meantime…
Hey it’s a little heat. Tell those folks up north to deal with it. (They laugh at us when we think it’s cold, don’t they?) Have a nice weekend everyone.
