Friends As we find ourselves in the middle of earnings season, the sloppiness that we anticipated is indeed occurring. Stocks such as Apple, IBM and Google have had fantastic earnings reports. On the other hand, bank earnings have been a bit of a mess and the shares...

Friends Earnings season has begun, and stocks will take their cue each trading day from various company reports. Alcoa led us off with a nice earnings report early in the week, but as has been the case for the last several quarters, the stock sold off a bit on the...

Friends I hope everyone had a great New Year’s celebration. The stock market started the week with a bang, as we had a very nice move up on Monday, the first trading day of the year. The rest of the week has been somewhat muted as we waited for the unemployment number...

Friends Well, Santa delivered us quite a nice Holiday rally in December (unless we give it all back today) didn’t he? As of the opening this morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up more than 5% for the month and the S&P 500 is up more than 6% for the month....

Friends The Santa Claus rally has been in full force thus far in December, but it looks like Santa may be running out of presents. In a word, the market looks a little tired. Overbought? Definitely. Extended? For sure. But stocks seem to be the recipient of money...

Friends Stocks continued their deliberate climb for the sixth day in a row today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 11,476 which is its highest level since September of 2008. The S&P 500 lost most of its gains by the close, but still managed to eke out a...

Friends The big news this week is the potential extension of the Bush tax cuts, which President Obama and some members of Congress seem to have agreed on. This gave the Santa Claus rally a little extra juice early in the week, but as House Democrats made their opinion...

Friends How about that! Stocks ended the day on a positive note with the Dow Jones Industrial Average ending the day at 11,381 up 19 points. The S&P 500 was up 3 points to end the day at 1224. On a day when stocks could have fallen quite a bit, the market showed...

Friends I hope everyone had a very nice Thanksgiving. Today marks the end of the month of November, so I thought I would pass on our thoughts for the month just ended, and take a look at what lies ahead of us. Stocks are ending the month virtually unchanged as...

Friends Bad news just overwhelmed the stock market on Tuesday, as the dust up in Korea combined with continuing European debt worries made up the problematic macro picture. On the domestic level, the continuing FBI probe into insider trading at many of the larger...

Friends The big news this week was the General Motors IPO (initial public offering) and basically it totally consumed the media and the market on Thursday. In general, the offering was a success, as the price came at the high-end of the expected range ($33) and...

Friends After yesterday’s failure to hold a 100 point rally in the Dow, the markets faced a barrage of difficult news this morning. First, China had a sizable drop overnight and then the continued European debt problems provided the fuel for an early morning selloff....

Friends, Well, the euphoria of last week’s election and Fed announcement sure did wear off this week. Both stocks and bonds have had a difficult week, and as has been the case in recent times, the direction of the dollar is the determining factor. Last night we got...

Friends Well traders sure did choose a side yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up over 219 points on Thursday as the bears were caught waiting for the “sell the news” effect and got just the opposite. The just released jobs number came in better than...