Skip to main content

Weekly Market Update - See Saw Market

Weekly Market Call

Investors received a load of economic data and continued earnings reports and the market did indeed go through some gyrations. In spite of hitting records during the week, the major averages finished down with the Russell 2000 turning in by far the worst performance and slumping 2.3%. Economic news ended up providing no major surprises, coming in fairly close to expectations. The market was driven primarily by earnings (decent, so far, with a few misses by high profile companies roiling the market) and continued bad news related to sub-prime CDO downgrades. In the ensuing flight to quality, many investors turned to bonds, driving the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury note down below 5% for the first time in weeks. For this week, we can expect more of the same. In terms of our market indicators below, we could see weakness earlier in the week and the averages moving up by end of week.

Upcoming economic news of note: Existing home sales and Fed Beige Book on Wednesday. Jobless claims, Durable Goods orders and New Home Sales on Thursday. Gross Domestic Product and Consumer Sentiment on Friday.

The following companies, among others, will be reporting earnings: American Express (AXP), Boeing (BA), DuPont (DD), McDonald's (MCD), 3M (MMM), Merck (MRK), AT&T (T), Texas Instruments (TXN), United Parcel Services (UPS), US Steel (X), Amazon.com (AMZN), Corning (GLW), Xerox (XRX), Apple (AAPL), Pulte Homes (PHM), TradeRadar stock pick Qualcomm (QCOM), Dow Chemicals (DOW), Anheuser-Busch (BUD) and Amgen (AMGN).

ETF Comments

Indexes: the ETFs that track the major indexes stumbed toward the end of the week except for IWM which stumbled mid-week as well as at the end of the week. The weakest of the bunch, IWM is sitting on its 50-day moving average having already fallen below the 20-day. Still, like the others (DIA, SPY and QQQQ), it is sitting well above its 200-day MA and is no danger yet of generating a TradeRadar sell signal.

Real Estate: REITs got slammed this week even as interest rates fell to the lowest level in over a month. As more sub-prime mortgage-backed bonds get downgraded by rating agencies the more turmoil we see in the real estate sector. The iShares US Real Estate ETF (IYR) moved down a couple of points and is once again below its 20, 50 and 200-day moving averages. This is not a good sign. The SPDR S&P Homebuilders ETF (XHB) is in the same boat. The news continues to be unremittingly bad from the residential real estate sector and XHB was not being looked at as a bargain this week.

Financials: last week I wrote that financials were trying to establish a bottom. This week the bottom fell out. The Financial Select Sector SPDR (XLF) is the lowest it has been in months and the high volume on Friday's down day leads me to believe we will see more weakness. This in spite of good earnings reported by some of the major money-center banks/brokerages. The KBW Bank ETF (KBE) is back down to where it was a week ago. Both of these ETFs are below their 20, 50 and 200-day moving averages and it looks like the bottom has not yet been seen.

TradeRadar Stock Picks

To view this week's updates on the portfolio of TradeRadar Stock Picks, please visit the Track Profit & Loss page at trade-radar.com
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brazil - in a bubble or on a roll?

A couple of years ago, no one recognized the real estate bubble even though it was under everyone's nose. Now, analysts and bloggers are seeing bubbles everywhere they look. One of them, they say is in Brazil whose Bovespa stock market index has doubled in the last 12 months. Does the bubble accusation hold water? I don't think so and here are 7 reasons why Brazil is by no means a bubble economy: Exports have held up over the past year thanks to demand from China for Brazil's soya exports and iron ore. This was helped by the the Brazilian government's drive to improve trade links with Asia and Africa. Export diversification, spurred by a more active trade policy and increased focus on "south-south" trade under current president Lula, helped mitigate the decline in demand from OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries A "sensible" economic framework has been in place since the 1990's. This has included inflation ...
4 comments
Read more

Trade Radar gets another update

Some of our data sources changed again and it impacted our ability to load fundamental/financial data. In response, we are rolling out a new version of the software: 7.1.24 The data sourcing issues are fixed and some dead links in the Chart menu were removed. So whether you are a registered user or someone engaged in the free trial, head over to our update page and download the latest version. The update page is here:   https://tradingstockalerts.com/software/downloadpatch Contact us if you have questions or identify any new issues.
Post a Comment
Read more

Time to be conservative with your 401K

Most of the posts I and other financial bloggers write are typically focused on individual stocks or ETFs and managing active portfolios. For those folks who are more conservative investors, those whose main investment vehicle is a 401K, for example, the techniques for portfolio management might be a little different. The news of stock markets falling and pundits predicting recession is disconcerting to professional investors as well as to those of us who are watching our balances in an IRA or 401K sag. What approach should the average 401K investor take? Let's assume that the investor is contributing on a regular basis to one of these retirement accounts. There are two questions that the investor needs to ask: 1. Should I stop putting the regular contribution into stocks? My feeling is that investors making regular contributions are being handed a present by the markets. Every week the market goes down, these investors are lowering their average cost. When markets reco...
7 comments
Read more