Friends,
It was another slow but difficult day for stocks, as traders just didn’t want to do any buying before the Thanksgiving holiday. The morning began with news that a German bund auction did not go well overnight and we were down right from the start. It’s one thing that investors don’t want Greek, Spanish or Italian bonds, but German debt should be the best that Europe has to offer. It simply put traders in a bad state of mind right from the start. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the day down 236 points to close at 11,257. The S&P 500 was down 26 points to finish the day at 1161. Gold was down $5.70 per ounce to trade at the $1696 level. Oil was down about $1.53 to close near $96.40 per barrel WTI.
At this point, we have given back a good portion of the gains that we enjoyed in October. It will be important to get some sort of calmness out of Europe if we are to have any chance of getting a Santa Claus rally. I’m still hopeful, when I see things like the fabulous earnings out of John Deere this morning and weekly unemployment claims numbers under 400,000. But as we know, the global macro-economic picture overwhelms everything going on that is positive domestically. We’ll try to get a good handle on the technical levels that we’ll be watching for the remainder of the year, as we have blown threw many support levels the past two weeks and a lot of damage has been done. Perhaps the mountain of negativity will be the contrarian indicator that we need to turn things back around. The pessimism is rampant as we enter the holiday season.
Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, let me just take a moment to thank all of you, our friends, for entrusting us to manage your hard earned money. You know how serious we take the trust you have put in us, and we will continue to deliver to you the service you have come to expect from us and, indeed, deserve. These are very difficult times, not only in this country, but in many parts of the world, so my wish is that each of us has a little something to be thankful for tomorrow. We will be right back at it on Friday (market is open for a half day), but we hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving. Don’t eat too much!
