Daily State of the Markets

Near-Term: It's All About The Headlines. Longer-Term: It's About...

A busy few days of entertaining family in Colorado provided a reprieve from the keyboard and the markets over the weekend. Thus, I'm going to let the indicators do most of the talking to start this holiday-shortened week. Briefly, the question of the day in my mind continues to be…

The Straws Breaking The Market's Back

Monday was another volatile day on Wall Street as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 602 points. Granted, problems at Apple (AAPL) and Goldman Sachs (GS) accounted for 170 of those points. And yes, the machines were clearly at work again yesterday - especially in the afternoon where…

Understanding the Current Earnings Game

When stocks enter a corrective phase, the main question investors need to ask themselves is, has anything changed from a macro point of view? One of the problems with trying to answer this question is that corrections generally are born out of a period of high confidence and/or co…

Garden-Variety So Far, But...

I've got an early meeting (who's idea was it to schedule a board meeting for 7:00am on a Monday??) and I am traveling the rest of the week, so I'm up early and would like to apologize in advance if this morning's market missive meanders more than normal! From my seat, the key ques…

Of Jobs, Apple, and Trade

It's the first Friday of the month, which means it is time for the Big Kahuna of economic data - the jobs report. So, without further ado, let's get to the report and review the bevy of numbers. The headline everyone focuses on new job creation for the month. The Bureau of Labor S…

Two Ways To Improve The Mood

There can be no denying that we've got a nasty market on our hands. A market where the venerable Dow Jones Industrial Average can be up 300 points one moment and down 600 the next. If that type of intraday volatility doesn't get your attention, nothing will. As I've opined a time …

How Low Can It Go?

Are we having fun yet? To be sure, the recent stock market correction has created some angst as the bears have knocked -7.55% off the DJIA, -9.63% off the S&P 500, -12.60% off the NASDAQ Composite, -12.86% from the Mid-cap index, and -15.69% from the Russell 2000 small-cap index. So, …

All About Fear

By now, anyone thinking that the low of the current corrective phase had been "put in" on October 11 is probably more than a little disappointed. Maybe even a bit dazed or even confused. It seems there were a great many folks who believed that the bulk of the pullback happened on 10/10 an…

Sifting Through The Conflicting Evidence

From my seat, the most important question on this fine Monday morning is if stocks are currently in the "retest" stage of a waterfall decline, which means that we are likely closer to the end of the correction than the beginning - or - if we are still in stage one, aka the initial decline…

Checking The Playbook

My guess is that after Wednesday's action, everyone is feeling a little better about the state of the stock market. While the bears and their algos mounted another series of attacks yesterday, good prevailed over evil and stocks managed to avoid getting hammered for a second consecutive d…