Friends Today was the first day of trading for the often treacherous month of September, and other than a handful of stocks including Apple, traders were in a selling mood as the session began. By the time we got the ISM Manufacturing report (which was again...

Friends Reading the speech that Fed Chairman Bernanke delivered this morning in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, I was struck by the fact that not only does Dr. Bernanke believe that what the Fed has done has been beneficial, he is more than ready to do more if and when it is...

Friends The second look at 2nd quarter GDP (first of two revisions) showed that the economy grew at 1.7% in the second quarter, which is just about what market participants were expecting. The first look had indicated growth at 1.5%. Ok, nothing too exciting, but hey...

Friends I am running out of clever ways to describe the lack of trading activity we continue to see. “Like watching paint dry”? No, not good enough. Suffice it to say, that as we wait on Dr. Bernanke’s speech at Jackson Hole this coming Friday, traders are just...

Friends After Friday’s nice gains, today marked another painfully quiet day of trading as stocks barely moved in either direction. But since today is Monday, stocks had to be down, right? Today marks 12 out of the last 13 Mondays that we had stocks in negative...

Friends After yesterday’s positive interpretation of the Fed minutes, St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard was on television this morning indicating that the markets somewhat rosy interpretation might have been slightly misguided. Basically Bullard implied that perhaps...

Friends The release of the Fed minutes from the last meeting three weeks ago, indicated that Dr. Bernanke and friends seem to be leaning towards additional quantitative easing very soon. Is it necessary? Will it work? Will we continue to see diminishing returns? We...

Friends, Well, we finally got a little action today. Unfortunately for the bulls, the action was mostly negative. Stocks got an early bounce led by another early charge by Apple, but after an unknown research firm downgraded Apple shares from a buy to a hold, the...

Friends, The dog days of summer continue as stocks spent another day simply drifting along in a very narrow range. With no real news of any sort, other than the unending debate about the disaster that is Facebook and the ultimate success story that is Apple (today...

Friends, The dog days of summer continue as stocks spent another day simply drifting along in a very narrow range. With no real news of any sort, other than the unending debate about the disaster that is Facebook and the ultimate success story that is Apple (today...

Friends It’s official! The bear’s hair is actually on fire. With no good news of any kind in sight, stocks continue to climb the proverbial “wall of worry”. Today’s release of the weekly jobless claims number, nor the Philly Fed Survey report, would give anyone a...

Friends The basic takeaway from today’s plethora of economic reports is that the economy is hanging in there, growing slowly with modest core inflation, and that at this pace the likelihood of additional QE before the election is growing very slim. With this as the...

Friends The rush of economic data began today with the release of the PPI (which was a little hotter than expected) and July’s Retail Sales number (which was definitely better than expected). Traders took their cue and bought stocks early, but as the day wore on the...

Friends Talk about the dog days of summer. Once again we experienced very quiet trading, but today, for the first time in a week we had a negative bias. With little economic news, as most of the networks focused on Congressman Ryan (God forbid, we actually have a...

Friends I haven’t seen markets this quiet in a long time. The guys in the office had to wake me in time to do today’s email. In all seriousness, without any real news of any consequence, stocks have just meandered along for most of this week on very little volume....