Friends
With traders out for a lot of this holiday week, look for volume to be light and stocks easily pushed around if there is any significant news. As for today, the main economic piece of news that we had was the ISM manufacturing index which was just awful. The street was expecting a number near 52.0 but what we got was 49.7 (below 50 is not good). Stocks seemed comatose until this number hit, but quickly retreated right after 9:00 AM our time. By the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average recovered and was down a mere 8 points to close at 12,871. The S&P 500 was actually up 3 points to finish the day at 1365. The NASDAQ was up about ½ of a percent also. Gold was down $5.3 to trade near the $1598 level, and oil was back down $1.28 to finish trading near $83.67 per barrel WTI. Why didn’t stocks fall much further on the lousy ISM number? More bad news is good news? Maybe. We’ll just mark it down to quiet trading.
Things should be extremely slow tomorrow as the markets close at noon our time. Of course, the markets are closed all day on Wednesday for the 4th of July holiday. We will be closing the office at 12:30 tomorrow and will be closed on Wednesday. We’ll be back at it on Thursday as the market participants prepare for the jobs report on Friday.
Have a nice evening everyone.
