Concentration on economic numbers and data is going to be intense for the next little while. |
I guess the sentiment picture that we've had in the last couple of weeks has been sufficiently negative to more or less push everyone to the sidelines. There's not a lot of volume in the markets. People are really sitting on their hands waiting to see what's going to happen tomorrow and Wednesday when the FOMC meets. |
I would characterize this as a profit-taking session. |
I would think that that stock would be held in a lot of index-type accounts that probably can't own a lot more American paper than they already do. |
In all likelihood, the Fed will act at the end of this month. |
Investors are going to take microscopes to these numbers, try to get behind them and try to pre-guess what the Fed is likely to do. |
It seems to be a situation where nobody really wants to do very much of anything, partly because of uncertainty of what could transpire in Iraq. Managers are chewing their fingernails a little bit about what the third quarter pre-announcements are going to look like over the next few weeks. |
It was very narrow, it was very focused and very dangerous. It was a rally that was built on very modest underpinnings. You knock out any one of those legs and you're in trouble. |
It's all CP today. There's a nice little gift for the folks that own CP. Unlock some of the conglomerate discounted value in those things. |
It's been quite a bizarre market. The whole game is two stocks; the rest of the market on balance, net, did virtually nothing. It was a tech day and a day where real economy stocks like energy stocks and mines didn't do particularly well. |
My guess is the action of the Fed was pretty much discounted by the market already. |
Now you've got the herd mentality rushing to the fore. This whole thing is nothing more than a reality check: it's a warning shot across the bow of the tech sector. The day traders and the tech-heavy investors, I think, are a little scared right now. |
People had themselves worked into state of expectation that the Fed was going you go 75 basis points and maybe even 100 and the fact that they only went 50 points (one-half percentage point) has obviously not been well received. |
Tech stocks are under great selling pressure. A quarter end is coming up and fund managers are probably trimming their positions in the technology sector simply because they don't want to show big tech weights at the end of their reporting period. |
The banks had some great moves last week and so we're just seeing a little bit of consolidation. |