Friends January is turning into a bit of a mess, isn’t it? Last night’s state of the union address was not market moving, but futures were buoyed overnight by action in Turkey, where they raised rates to defend their currency. It worked for about 10 seconds. By the...

Friends After last week’s struggles, stocks endured a very volatile day. After a nice pop on the open, stocks gave up those gains and fell to negative territory by late morning. The bulls gathered themselves and staged another rally in the early afternoon, only to run...

Friends Stocks fell for the 4th day in a row, leaving the Dow down more than 3% for the week. In addition this was the worst day for the Dow since June of last year. The reason for all the weakness this week has mainly been attributed to the turmoil in emerging...

Friends Fueled by overnight weakness in China, stocks suffered a difficult day. China’s problems revolve around weakening manufacturing data and an economic slowdown which has lingered for some time now. Domestically, the weekly jobless claims were harmless, and LEI...

Friends On this the second day of trading for 2014, stocks saw a little more volatility as the bulls stepped up to the plate in the early afternoon pushing the Dow up 70 points, only to back away once again in the last half hour of trading. With the weather problems...

Friends We have been seeing several cases of stocks priced for perfection suffering sell-offs despite what seems to be decent, if not good earnings reports. We suspected that this might occur this earnings season. Dow components Johnson & Johnson , Verizon,...

Friends The Dow Jones Industrial Average masked a very weak day for stocks. On the economic front, housing starts, as expected were down, and consumer sentiment slipped in December, but industrial production was encouraging. Once again, mixed results. Speaking of...

Friends A couple more good reports from major money center banks and another good day for stocks. Also helping was a better than expected Empire State Manufacturing number which had been lagging other regions of the country, and a hotter, but expected PPI number....

Friends What a difference a day makes. Buyers seemed interested again today, whether emboldened by decent earnings from a couple of major banks, or just doing a little bargain hunting, stocks traded in positive territory for the entire session. It will be interesting...

Friends Just when investors were beginning to feel a little frisky, the government released a miserable non-farm payroll number this morning. Analysts had been falling all over themselves raising their “guess” for the number of jobs created in December. The consensus...

Friends As we prepare for the onslaught of earnings season, today’s focus was economic news including a very strong ADP private payroll number which came in at 238,000 new jobs created in December vs. the consensus estimate of 205,000. The expectations for a good...

Friends Stocks broke their 3 day losing streak and gained enough ground to almost erase the early in the year losses. Unless tomorrow produces a big move either way, the first 5 days of trading may end up not giving much indication of direction for the market. The...

Friends We seemed to get everyone back to work today, except those in the frozen Midwestern part of the country, but the action didn’t really pick up much. Stocks had a first good half hour of trading but gave back nearly triple digit gains on the Dow after a somewhat...