Before the Open (Oct 1)

Good morning. Happy Monday. Hope you had a nice weekend.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mixed and with a bullish bias. China, Hong Kong and South Korea were closed. Japan dropped 0.8%. Europe is currently up across the board. Austria, France, Switzerland and London are up more than 1%. Futures here in the States point towards a moderate gap up open for the cash market.

The dollar is down. Oil and copper are down. Gold and silver are down.
I don’t have much to add to the weekend comments made in the Weekly Report.
The euro zone unemployment rate hit a record high in August…11.4% which corresponds to 18.196M people being out of work.
For the 14th straight month, the euro zone PMI reading came in below 50, indicating economic contraction.
HON is buying a 70% stake in Thomas Russell, a privately owned company, for $525M.
JAKK is down almost 10% premaret – they lowered their 2012 financial outlook.
GMAN is down 11% – they cut their earnings forecast.
SSH is up 14%.
CRDN is up 43% – MMM is acquiring the company.
FONR is up 27%.
TWR is buying back $1B in stock.
At 12:30 PM ET, Ben Bernanke will deliver a speech called “Five Questions about the Federal Reserve and Monetary Policy” at the Economic Club Of Indiana. He’s expected to talk about QE3 unlimite and the outlook for the US economy.
As I stated over the weekend, the intermediate term trends are up, but in the near term, things are less clear. Charts of individual stocks improve a bunch last week, but several indicators hit high levels and have turned down. I’d prefer seeing a continuation of the selling pressure to allow these indicators to cycle down rather than have them turn in no-man’s land. We’ll see. More after the open.
headlines at Yahoo Finance
headlines at MarketWatch
today’s upgrades/downgrades
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers