Friends Stocks bounced back a little bit today putting an end to the losing streak that we have seen over the past several sessions. Whether it was a convincing turnaround or not may lie in the eye of the beholder. Nevertheless, the bulls did come off the sidelines to...

Friends Last night on 60 Minutes, there was a segment focusing on Michael Lewis’s new book which evidently focuses on High Frequency Trading and the unfair aspects of machines front running human beings. In the interview, Mr. Lewis claims the stock market is “rigged”....

Friends Today marks the end of the first quarter of 2014. It looks like the S&P ends up slightly higher and the Dow slightly lower for the quarter. It was definitely a tug-of-war between the bulls and the bears. A positive perspective on the first quarter...

Friends Stocks enjoyed another nice trading session, as decent economic news (a better than expected Case -Shiller Index showed strength in housing prices) and lack of any new disturbing news in Ukraine, had traders in the buying mood. The Fed began its 2 day FOMC...

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...

Friends Trading was quiet today, as the market averages spent time in both the black and the red throughout the session, but never very far from the breakeven point. The weekly jobless claims number was slightly better than expected coming in at 311,000 for the week....

Friends We had another volatile day of trading, as an early 98 point gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Averages turned into a 98 point loss by the end of the session. We have seen many of these days where early gains disappear and the bulls are not able to push the...

Friends Volatility picked up a little today as stocks rallied at the open to the tune of about 100 Dow points, then gave back almost all of those gains, only to rally once again in the afternoon. The economic data released throughout the morning was a bit mixed and...

Friends If we were just looking at the Dow Jones Industrial Average today, we might be tempted to say that it was a pretty non-eventful trading day. But the broader market averages had much more trouble, with the NASDAQ actually down by more than a percent. The Dow,...

Friends As we pointed out yesterday, it was the messenger, not the message. Once traders got over the shock of watching our new Fed Chair, they realized that nothing really changed, and even if Ms. Yellen’s timetable seemed a bit hawkish, future data will determine...

Friends Traders were just killing time today, waiting for the FOMC meeting to come to a conclusion and stocks were drifting along right at the breakeven level. Then we got the FOMC statement, which, as we expected, kept the tapering process on schedule and revealed...

Friends Stock futures were looking sluggish this morning until Mr. Putin indicated in a prepared statement that he had no intentions on going beyond Crimea and moving into Eastern Ukraine. He indicated he still doesn’t recognize the current Ukrainian government as...

Friends Relieved that nothing unexpected happened over the weekend in Crimea/Ukraine, stocks rallied strongly in the morning and were able to hold onto most of the gains as the trading session wore on. Whether it was short covering by bears expecting something worse...

Friends As we approach the end of the first quarter of the year, and wait for the Crimean vote over the weekend (the outcome seems obvious), we will take a second to illustrate what we mentioned yesterday – 2014 is turning out to be much different than 2013. Last year...