Friends The “Teflon” market continues to climb the “wall of worry”. Bad consumer confidence numbers this morning coupled with awful housing numbers, did not deter traders from buying stocks today. The S&P 500 closed above 1319, right at a resistance level. 1323 is the...

Friends Impressive, is the best term I can use for the resiliency of the stock market over the past few weeks. Talk about a lot to deal with. We’ve had strife in Egypt and then Libya, the devastation in Japan, and now we’re focusing, again, on the European debt crisis...

Friends I hope you had a nice weekend and enjoyed the beautiful weather. I don’t want you to think that the only time you hear from us is on down days, so I am happy to report that stocks enjoyed a 178 point rise in Dow Jones Industrial Average closing well above...

Friends Friday was a day full of moves as we had the G7 central banks overnight agree to a coordinated intervention to keep the Japanese Yen from continuing its climb. As the Japanese currency rises vs. other currencies, it becomes more difficult for Japanese...

Friends How about a little pep talk at this point. After days of delivering bad news (and today isn’t any better with the Dow down 242 points), I want you to remember what our mindset was, just two years ago this month. Remember, we had experienced the second 50% drop...

Friends As the Libyan situation continues to be in the forefront of trader’s minds, every rumor sends the market careening in one direction or another. Yesterday we first heard that Gadhafi had chemical weapons ready to be used. Market goes down. Later in the day we...

Friends We will attempt to keep you up to date with the Libyan situation and its effect on the markets. Today was similar to yesterday with oil trading higher (at one point crossing $100 on the NYMEX) and stocks trading lower. At one point, the Dow Jones Industrial...

Friends The unrest in Libya finally broke the uptrend in stocks today. Stocks fell early in the morning and continued throughout the day with the Dow Jones Industrial Average ending down 178 points (-1.44%). As would be expected, oil and gold were both up big for the...

Friends Austerity doesn’t feel too good when it’s your privileges and money that someone wants you to do without. We are seeing in Wisconsin that the austerity movement has come to our shores, and sometimes it is not pretty. This is only the beginning of the...

Friends As we return this Monday, stocks seem to continue to want to move higher. At the close the S&P was slightly higher. Still, traders continue to be concerned with valuation and the fact that we have not had any sizable retracement in prices in quite a while. As...

Friends Welcome from the frozen tundra here in Texas. What the heck is going on around here. If this is what “climate change” is all about, you can count me out. Anyway, let’s get to the markets. As we reported earlier in the week, stocks got above the Dow 12,000...

Friends Stocks rallied to two and a half year highs as the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the day up 148 points to close well above the 12,000 level. The S&P 500 closed at 1307 easily surpassing the psychological 1300 barrier. The news out of Egypt was mixed as...

Friends The GDP number was just released and the U.S. Economy grew at 3.2% for the 4th quarter 2010. The number is a little less than analysts were estimating (consensus was for 3.5%), but if we look back 6 to 12 months, we all would have been thrilled to see a number...

Friends Just an update on today’s market action in response to the events in Egypt. Stocks sold off today as images of unrest in Egypt dominated the news cycle. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended down 166 points. As we discussed this morning, a pullback from the...