Friends
Wow! After a somewhat uneventful slow grind upward in the first quarter, we seem to be back to the days of volatility once again these first few weeks of the second quarter. The last couple of weeks were decisively negative once the dust settled on them, but so far this week we are rocking to the upside. Shrugging off somewhat disappointing Housing Starts and Industrial Production numbers, stocks rose right at the opening bell and never looked back. For the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 194 points to close at 13,115. The S&P 500 was up 21 to close at 1390. Gold was up $1.30 to trade near $1651 per ounce and oil was up $1.29 to finish trading near $104.22 per barrel WTI.
This morning, we got earnings from Coca Cola, Goldman Sachs and Johnson and Johnson, just to name a few, and so far so good on the earnings front. It seems that expectations may have been ratcheted down enough to allow some room for many of these reports to beat expectations. After Apple had fallen 10% in 5 days, today we saw the tech bellwether bounce back and regain half of that loss and drag many of the other high flyers with it.
We’ll continue to see an onslaught of earnings reports, so it will be interesting to see if companies can continue to surprise to the upside. So far this week, it looks like traders were caught flat footed after the beating the bulls took the past two weeks. We’ll see if it can continue.
Have a nice evening everyone.
