Friends Today is a great reminder that Central Bankers and Politicians may have grandiose plans, but eventually people that are affected by those plans just might have something to say about them. The austerity protest that turned violent in Madrid, Spain this...

Friends The news dominating the day was that Apple “only” sold 5 million iPhone 5’s this weekend. You know why they only sold 5 million iPhone 5’s this weekend? Because that’s all the iPhone 5’s they had. That seems like a good problem to have. Gee, I can’t make...

Friends Traders seemed to be waiting all day for the much ballyhooed rebalancing of the S&P 500 at the close of trading. As it turned out, stocks had another day of drifting until the last ten minutes, and even then it wasn’t much of a move. For the day, the Dow Jones...

Friends Nothing happened today. No, I really mean it, absolutely nothing happened in the markets today. The weekly new unemployment claims number was a non-event. The number has remained under 400,000 but just barely for months now. No news there. Stocks just seem to...

Friends The bulls attempted to take stocks considerably higher early in the trading session, but by the end of the day they couldn’t muster much of an advance. The big story the last couple of days has been the $10 collapse in oil prices after last week’s run up. Of...

Friends It was another very quiet day of trading, as after last week’s bevy of news, traders seem to be searching for a reason to buy or sell. The bulls got their excitement last week when Dr. Bernanke and the Fed went “all in”, and the bears still seem shell shocked...

Friends Well it is fitting that the last Monday of the Summer was negative for stocks. Nearly every Monday (14 out of the last 15) this summer has had a selling bias and after last week’s fireworks, it is not surprising that we would give a little back early this...

Friends The bears brought a knife to the fight. Dr. Bernanke brought a bazooka. Sure, traders expected the Fed Chairman to announce some type of QE today, but what they got was much more than they bargained for. The FOMC statement that came out at 11:30 our time,...

Friends Other than Apple rolling out the iPhone 5, today was rather void of news, and markets were rather quiet as a result. Remember, today was day one of the Fed meeting. Tomorrow is day two and we’ll get the announcement late in the morning and Dr. Bernanke’s press...

Friends I’d like to begin today’s note by first saying that we are very much thinking about those who were lost 11 years ago today. We will never forget them or that fateful day. Now we’ll turn our attention to the markets. Stocks recovered Monday’s losses during...

Friends It must be Monday, the stock market was down. As we have seen all summer, stocks seem to rally on Fridays and then sell off on Mondays. There really is no magic explanation, we’ll just assume that traders basically start each week scared to death of what might...

Friends After yesterday’s fireworks, provided mainly by ECB President Mario Draghi, traders came to work this morning prepared for the government jobs report. Knowing that President Obama knew this number yesterday (and he sure looked a little deflated last night...

Friends The bears took a double punch to the gut this morning, as the markets got both decent domestic economic news and a bazooka from the ECB. First, we’ll discuss the ECB news. ECB President Mario Draghi announced this morning an “unlimited” government bond buying...

Friends Traders were very indecisive today, as stocks simply drifted from positive to negative territory all day long. It seemed that no one wanted to step in front of what might occur over the next several days. Remember, we should get some direction as to what Mr....