Friends An old adage on Wall Street has been “never sell a quiet market”. Guess what- we have had a very quiet market (albeit with an upward bias) in terms of volatility in the past few weeks. Well today, despite an awful Philly Fed number which measures manufacturing...

Friends Markets continue to trade in a relatively calm manner as we find ourselves past the halfway point in the year’s first month. Intraday volatility is way down as traders seem to be somewhat disinterested in taking any big stance before the bulk of this earnings...

Friends Stocks continue to confound the bears, as despite less than stellar economic reports this morning, attempts to sell the market were met with buying. The retail sales report was not bad, but the Empire Manufacturing survey was not good. Add to this a...

Friends Don’t look now, but the year is not off to a very good start for stocks. For whatever reason one wants to assign to it, the market seems to be very tentative at the moment. Perhaps it’s not a selling spree, but it sure doesn’t seem like buyers have much of an...

Friends After a couple of down days followed by a couple of up days, Friday’s session was about as quiet a session as we have seen in a long time. Stocks barely moved off the breakeven line all day long, as volatility seemed to just disappear. It’s kind of odd how...

Friends After the week opened with two very similar down days, the last two sessions have been identical to the upside. Once again, we opened trading with a nice 50 point Dow gain and spent the rest of the day meandering along, until building on the gains in the last...

Friends Today was just the opposite of the last two days. Stocks got off to a good start and basically held the gains for the entire session. After yesterday afternoon’s decent earnings release by Alcoa, traders seemed to be in a little better frame of mind. I suspect...

Friends Today was somewhat a repeat of yesterday, as stocks fell early (nearly 90 Dow points), then spent the rest of the day trying to pare some of the losses. Once again, it seems that traders are simply not interested in buying at the moment. It’s not so much that...

Friends Markets were somewhat quiet on Monday, as there was an early downward bias in the stock market. Traders seemed to want to give back Friday’s gains right from the start, and within a few minutes, stocks were trading with losses of more than 80 points on the...

Friends With the non-farm payroll number coming in right on the expected number, traders got back in the buying mood during today’s session sending stock prices to highs we have not seen for some time. As we mentioned, yesterday’s pause was refreshing, and traders...

Friends After yesterday’s frenzied rally stocks took a breather today, as traders seemed to be wanting to simply catch their breath. The afternoon had a downward bias after the release of the Fed minutes indicated that some of the Fed Governors where suggesting that...

Friends Well, Congress and The White House finally agreed to a solution that solves the fiscal cliff by raising revenues on the rich (hey they don’t need the money anyway) and slashing spending on social programs which will help us finally achieve a balanced budget....

Friends The last trading day of the year is typically pretty dull. Not today. As rumors and reports of a “fiscal cliff” deal bombarded traders, stocks gyrated back and forth in wild fashion. As of this writing, it looks like some sort of deal has been agreed to, and...