Friends
That pattern continues. Up mornings followed by afternoon sell-offs (the Dow was up about 100 points early). Now I grant you, not much damage has been done, with the S&P about flat YTD and the Dow down just a bit. But the old adage is that the first half hour of trading is not so much the “smart money”. These quick up openings, followed by bleeding the rest of the session is not typically how bull markets are extended. The good news for the bulls is that the bears really haven’t inflicted much damage yet. If we can grind at these levels for a while, perhaps earnings can catch up and lessen the recent P/E expansion that we saw last year. Of course, that assumes earnings will improve. We’ll see.
As for today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 58 points to close at 16,323. The S&P 500 was up 8 points to finish the day at 1857. Gold was down $1 to trade at $1293 per ounce, while oil was up $.33 to trade at $101.61 per barrel WTI.
We have one more trading day before the end of the quarter, but the story for the first quarter of 2014 will be a lot of IPO’s and a lot of volatility in high risk growth type stocks. Also we have gotten confirmation that the Fed will continue the taper and at some point will actually begin to raise rates (not this year). Let’s see how the quarter ends on Monday.
Have a great weekend everyone.
