It was not a pretty day. Sort-of like beating a dead horse. |
Overall, economic news continues to be positive, corporate earnings continue to come in well and oil prices have come down this week. At the same time, you have interest rates, inflation and geopolitical issues that represent the unknown. |
Perhaps this is the new world, as hard and as cold as it seems. This was strictly a business decision, made by people who were removed from the trading floor. |
The clearer sign that the market is ready to go higher is that you can have bad news and individual stocks or the market tends to ignore that news. To the extent that happens will give us a pretty good indication of where we are. |
The rally was largely technical, so it's not surprising that there was some selling today. |
The tone was really good. Maybe it was just an absence of bad news and a lot of money on the sidelines. ...There's a ton of liquidity out there looking for the slightest excuse to get in. But the market continues to be range bound. Although we had a good day today, it's after two down days and it's probably mostly technical. |
The two most important factors that continue to influence the market to a large degree are the direction of interest rates and the price of oil. |
There is strength in this group because there is the feeling there will be a lot of consolidation in the sector. |
There's a minor witch hunt going on. Everyone is focusing on the negative. |
There's no conviction out there right now. The rallies don't hold. |
They [Lucent] gave us some pretty negative guidance this morning about how they didn't think they'd be profitable until 2003 at the earliest. I think it put a big lid on a lot of the positive activity we've seen in the tech sector. |
They are clearly a proxy for interest rates. The catalyst was interest rates. |
This is a classic bear-market rally. I suspect it may follow through tomorrow, but I would say it's premature to get too excited about it just yet. |
Today's market was almost a mirror image of yesterday, with both starting out weak and turning it around by the close. ...There's not a lot of volume, but up is better than down. |
Tomorrow we'll see how the market reacts to Intel's news. Remember, the market needs to look forward but earnings are trailing and not looking forward. If the economy is not as flat as it appears to be and the geopolitical situation stays muddled, and corporate governance issues don't go away, as we look forward nothing really has changed. |