Friends While the business media were in a frenzy over the resignation/firing of Citibank’s CEO Vikram Pandit this morning, the bulls quietly, while no one was looking, took the market on a nice advance. Just a day after Citibank announced a better than expected...

Friends Stocks began the week on a good note today, as after an uneventful first hour of trading, shares began to rise and by midday we had ourselves a hundred point gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  By the close, stocks were able to hold on to most of their...

Friends I’m not sure if the market actually closed today, or did it just fall asleep? The week ended with two days of very little volatility and very little interest from the trading community. Two major banks reported earnings this morning, one (J P Morgan) was a...

Friends Stocks fell for the 4th day in a row, and the sell-off keeps getting a little worse each day. The culprit today seemed to be the mixed signals that we have already gotten at the beginning of earnings season. We had a couple of early beats by the likes of YUM...

Friends Even though trading was very light, it was a somewhat messy day for stocks. After a very short-lived rally in the first hour of trading, stocks spent the rest of the day in negative territory. The visual of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Greece, with...

Friends Oh well, just another down Monday, after finally breaking the trend last week. On this quiet Columbus Day, trading was light and volatility was modest. Tomorrow, after the close, Alcoa kicks off earnings season. We are curious to see how stocks react after...

Friends When all was said and done, this was a very good week on the domestic economic front as we got good news on the manufacturing and service sectors, housing and finally this morning on jobs. Yes, even though we only got 114,000 new jobs created last month...

Friends Regardless of the stock markets confusion this week, the news on the domestic economic front has been pretty darn good. On Monday we had a better than expected ISM manufacturing number and today we got a better than expected ISM non-manufacturing (service...

Friends Traders seem a bit confused as the 4th quarter begins, and who can blame them. We came out of the shoot yesterday with a bang only to falter into the close. Today we basically were trying to give back yesterday’s gains, but a late day rally helped limit the...

Friends How about that! We actually had an up day on a Monday. Maybe we have broken the trend of down Mondays that we experienced all summer. Now if you were watching this thing all day long you may have gotten a feeling that it was really a negative day. That’s...

Friends Stocks limped into the end of the quarter, but after all the hand wringing (I know I did my share) and concern about how bad things are, it turned out to be a good one for the bulls. Sure, the economy is slowing as we speak and there is a fiscal cliff looming,...

Friends Traders shook off some disturbing economic news today and bid up stocks as we come to the end of the 3rd quarter. First, we got the final revision of the 2nd quarter GDP which settled at up only 1.3% (remember, at first look we were around 2%). We also...

Friends Yesterday they were demonstrating in Spain, today it was Greece (we’ve seen this one before), and once again traders decided that they just didn’t want to buy stocks today. Actually, ever since the big rally on Fed day a couple of weeks ago, stocks have found...