The geopolitical headline risk doesn't look good. |
The market is clearly responding to the drop in consumer confidence. It's hard to be terribly optimistic when it cost you $60 to fill up the car. |
The only good spot today was factory orders. |
The report is preliminary and it seems to be an outlier. Investors chose to focus on earnings reports. |
These numbers combined with yesterday's ... gives the Fed a lot of ammunition to raise interest rates and if you have, at the same time, the economy slowing, that's just going to make a really difficult environment for stocks. |
This is expected to be one of the worse hurricane seasons, and so far they're right and we're only halfway through it. All you have to do is pose the question: What if you had another monster storm in another few weeks, just as things are starting to come back on line? I don't know how you would avoid recession in that environment. |
This really is an impressively durable market, but there's so much more to come later in the week. Ask me later in the week, and we'll see where we stand then. |
Those are kind of defensive stocks, with fairly inelastic demand. In good times and bad, you're going to use those types of products. |
To say that we knew she was going to improve and excel at the rate that she is, that would not be a true statement. She has exceeded the schedule that I thought. She is probably already at the point where I thought she would be in two years. |
We are starting to see the bite from some of the risks that have been lurking in the background, like oil. I think it's going to continue to be tougher for this market to do anything positive. |
We finally got that monkey off our back. |
We may be getting very close to the end of this rate-increase cycle and it may be also time for the Fed to make that clear. Stocks will benefit from that. |
What's going to drive things over the next several weeks is how third-quarter earnings come out, |