Friends
Another very quiet trading day, but with an upward bias as the session wore on. We have had a plethora of earnings releases this week and we’ve seen shares of the companies reporting have different reactions. Today, for instance, despite a somewhat lukewarm earnings report, Starbucks ended the day in the green after being lower in premarket trading. The shares of Starbucks had been quiet as of late so it appears there was not a lot of excess in the price. On the other hand, shares of stocks like General Electric and Honeywell had been on a nice run as of late, so despite decent earnings reports (but both with some warts) both stocks sold off sharply. Once again, how stocks react to the earnings reports, whether better or worse than expected, is the key and we are seeing a diverse set of examples so far this earnings season.
As for today’s trading, by the close the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 53 points to finish the day at 18,570. The S&P 500 was up 9 points to close at 2175. Gold was down $7 to trade at $1,323 per ounce, while oil was down $.57 to trade at $44.18 per barrel WTI.
Unfortunately, once again today, we have seen another terrorist act, this time in Munich. It appears that markets have become numb to these events and we hardly see any reaction at all to them. Let’s hope as human beings we aren’t becoming too jaded by it all, but it is becoming hard not to. It really is interesting to see how little effect global terrorism and for that matter our own political theater has had on stock prices. We’ll stay focused on earnings for now. The rest is just all too crazy.
Have a great weekend everyone.
