Friends
Stocks struggled for most of the trading session, except Amazon, which bucked the trend and forged higher. After we saw a very good advance for stocks last week, fueled by encouraging news that mitigation seemed to be flattening the virus curve, and then on Friday, that the Fed was providing an even stronger tailwind, it wasn’t surprising to see a little profit taking throughout the day. Of course we will begin to see a steady stream of corporate earnings releases, which are surely to be unpleasant. The good news on the earnings front is that expectations could not be lower. No one has any visibility, and we certainly can’t expect corporate leaders to be able to give us any guidance on future earnings. One would think that should already be factored into expectations.
Stocks were able to trim losses into the close, so for the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 328 points to finish the day at 23,390. The S&P 500 was down 28 points to close at 2,761. Gold was up $13 to trade at $1,766 per ounce, while oil was down $.05 to trade at $22.71 per barrel WTI.
Because, our daily “chats” are a little more lengthy and detailed, we are not going to do a 2nd quarter outlook piece. There’s not much we could add to the quarterly discussion that we aren’t doing on a daily basis, and none of us has any real visibility going forward anyway. So, for now we’ll continue to keep you up to date on a daily basis, including mixing in some videos. Given last week’s gains, this wasn’t too bad a day. Let’s see how the week unfolds.
Have a nice evening everyone.
