Friends Hope was in the air after yesterday's strong rally in stocks, a huge rally in Asian shares overnight, and a nice 150 plus Dow point opening rally this morning. But alas, sellers appeared and another ugly reversal ensued. I don't think any of us thought that we...

Friends Well it looks like traders came back from the Hamptons and the Labor Day Weekend with a much better attitude. After another bad week for stocks last week, shoppers looking for bargains decided that they would begin to dip their toe in the water after some...

Friends First, let's talk about the jobs report. The non-farm payroll number showed an increase of 173,000 new jobs in August, which was a little shy of expectations. The unemployment rate fell to 5.1%, while average hourly earnings increased 0.3% (average hours...

Friends As we close in on Labor Day weekend, trading is becoming thinner and as traders focus in on tomorrow's jobs report. Yesterday's private sector ADP number was a bit shy of expectations, but expectations for tomorrow's government non-farm payroll number is...

Friends First, just wrapping up the action in August, we saw the Dow drop about 6.5% while the S&P was down about 6.25% for the month. Well, September didn't start much better. I hope you didn't feel like last week's rally off those Monday lows meant that the...

Friends Stocks spent the day in negative territory as weakness overseas spread to our shores at the open and buyers never showed up to change the direction. Yes, we did rally from the lows of the day, but it never felt like the bulls had any control of the situation....

Friends We did have some volatility today, but it was in a much narrower range and quieter manner. An interview with Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer in the late morning gave traders a couple of headlines to trade on, but as the afternoon wore on, buyers and sellers...

Friends Guess what! We had a lot of volatility today. I know, what a shock, huh? Actually, it was shaping up to be another great day for the bulls, and after a late date hiccup, it did end up being a great one, but of course we had to have a little drama along the...

Friends Ok, now that's a little better. After yesterday's massively failed rally, today's early gains didn't exactly instill confidence in the hearts of traders, but as it turns out, the gains not only held, but increased in the last hour of trading. A second massive...

Friends It was no real surprise that China announced new stimulus measures overnight to hopefully stem the tide of their stock market decline. As a matter of fact, we spoke about its likelihood in our conference call yesterday. Stock futures were rallying even before...

Friends Wow, what a day. I hope many of you were able to join us on our conference call this morning. If not I will try to summarize what we talked about below. First let's try to figure out just what happened today. After overseas weakness, stocks were set to open...

Friends Well, we have been waiting for/expecting this for quite some time. The last time we saw a week like this was back in 2011. Simply put, the market is correcting. Will we be entering a prolonged bear market? Of course, no one knows. The Russell 2000 (small cap)...

Friends If I told you we are in the middle of a bear market you might wonder what I was talking about. The Dow is only down about 4.5%  YTD, and the S&P is down a little more than 1% for the year. That doesn't sound that bad, does it? Unfortunately, underneath the...

Friends We had some fireworks today while everyone was waiting for the 1:00 (our time) release of the FOMC minutes, Bloomberg "accidently" released the headlines about 20 minutes early. The minutes were mainly interpreted as slightly dovish (perhaps no rate hike in...

Friends Stocks drifted aimlessly in negative territory for the entire trading session today, and considering that we had more stress in China overnight that really wasn't too bad. Walmart's terrible earnings report didn't help, but at least Home Depot's good report...