Before the Open (Aug 27)

Good morning. Happy Monday. Hope you had a nice weekend.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mostly down; China dropped 1.7%. Europe is currently almost up across the board; there are no 1% movers. Futures here in the States point towards a moderate gap up open for the cash market.

The dollar flat. Oil and copper are up. Gold and silver are down.
Hertz (HTZ) is buying Dollar Thrify (DTG).
InterActive (IACI) is buying About.com from the New York Times.
Tiffany (TIF) missed earnings expectations and lowered full-year guidance.
AAPL will easily gap to a new all-time high today. A court ruled in their favor against Samsung in their patent lawsuit. Samsung dropped 7.5% in South Korea. Nokia jumped almost 10%. GOOG is down 2.1% in pre market trading.
AOL is paying a special one-time dividend of $5.15/share on Dec 14 to stockholders of record on Dec 5. The stock is up almost 5% before the open.
There isn’t much else out news wise, and I don’t have anything to add to my weekend comments. The trend is up, but we need to be on our toes. The next couple weeks could be huge. Bernanke’s speech at Jackon Hole on Thursday is this week’s big event. Wall St. will be looking for hints of QE3, which, if it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen at the Sept 13 meeting, not the Oct 24 meeting which is too close to the election. Some market participants are expecting QE3, so there could be a big let down if it’s not received. But it’s possible the rally off the June low has been in anticipation of QE3, so there could be a “sell the news” scenario anyways.
The Republican convention is supposed to start today. I’m not expecting fireworks…assuming anything is done.
I expect mostly more of the same slow movement until Thursday’s speech. More after the open.
headlines at Yahoo Finance
headlines at MarketWatch
today’s upgrades/downgrades
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers