Good morning. Happy Friday.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mostly up. Indonesia rallied 2.2%; Australia, India, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan also did well. Europe is currently mostly down. Belgium is down 2.7%; France, Germany, Amsterdam, Norway, Spain and Italy are also weakish. Greece is up 1%. Futures here in the States point towards a flat open for the cash market.
The dollar is up slightly. Oil and copper are down. Gold and silver are down.
It’s the last day of August. Barring a ridiculous and unexpected rally, the market will close with its biggest monthly loss since June 2012.
For long term investors this is not a huge concern. They can’t expect the market to indefinitely go up month after month. They should manage positions wisely, but they should not panic because if they wish to nail the big moves, they have to be comfortable holding through minor corrections.
For shorter term traders, holding through a correction is flat out stupid unless you happen to be in a stock that has held up great. Otherwise you get flat and wait to buy a dip, or you get flat and go short.
Since I’m a swing trader (that means, under ideal conditions I hold for a couple weeks and let charts play out) I’ve been laying low. I see no point in forcing trades. I’m ok with sitting tight, doing a short term trade here and there to stay in the game, or otherwise waiting for the conditions to improve.
Stock headlines from barchart.com…
Intel (INTC -0.99%) was upgraded to “Buy” from “Hold” at Argus.
Staples (SPLS -0.50%) was downgraded to “Neutral” from “Overweight” at JPMorgan.
Apache (APA -0.67%) was upgraded to “Outperform” from “Sector Perform” at RBC Capital.
Big Lots (BIG +1.52%) reported Q2 adjusted EPS of 31 cents, better than consensus of 24 cents.
Carl Icahn reported a 16.9% stake in Nuance (NUAN -1.03%) .
Esterline (ESL +1.38%) reported Q3 EPS ex-items of $1.65, well ahead of consensus of $1.53.
SAIC (SAI +1.06%) was awarded a NASA contract valued at approximately $1.8 billion to provide a broad range of support services to the agency’s Johnson Space Center Human Health and Performance directorate and the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate Human Research Program.
S.A.C. Capital reported a 5.5% passive stake in NQ Mobile (NQ +0.06%) .
Krispy Kreme (KKD +4.45%) fell over 6% in after-hours trading after it reported Q2 adjusted EPS of 14 cents, lower than consensus of 16 cents.
Salesforce.com (CRM +2.03%) rose over 5% in after-hours trading after it reported Q2 adjusted EPS of 9 cents, better than consensus of 7 cents, while the stock was added to the short-term buy list at Deutsche Bank.
Earnings and Economic Numbers from seekingalpha.com…
Today’s economic calendar:
8:30 Personal Income and Outlays
9:45 Chicago PMI
9:55 Reuters/UofM Consumer Sentiment
3:00 PM USDA Ag. Prices
Notable earnings before today’s open: BIG, SOL, YGE
Notable earnings after today’s close: none
Other…
today’s upgrades/downgrades from briefing.com
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers
0 thoughts on “Before the Open (Aug 30)”
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Same levels to watch, 1630 downside and 1655 upside. Unfilled gap above 1654.25 (ES) from Mon’s close. Will they try to fill it this week? Yeah, dunno either, but it’s there.
August is gone and the traders have managed the market nicely. Maybe the middle east is off the calendar for a while. Don’t UK to do much now or ever again except run up debt. Sept is hell week since congress is in session, probably means nothing. Larry or Janet take over the Fed – god help us. And debt ceiling is a war zone, but maybe put off to year end – usual good management. Core position opens in Oct to May, and I trade around the core. Gold down to 1300 then an attempt at 1450. Worse weekend of the year. Drive carefully too much drinking and pot in Washington and Colorado and the Fed says have at it. Summer is for sailing, not markets and my book proves it.
The Fridays before holiday weekends since 911 have not been good for the bulls.
just went long ,but only looking for a counter trend scalp into europe close
RIO de genero nude beach
at a hare past 1 pm all the bears died eating poisened bull
and we will now have a super bull phase
this murderouse false break was preplaned by the bulls to trigger as the nas and
spx broke y/days low piviot
and i will have to report them to the constabulary
im long,for how long ,who knows
Jason,
Just read your article on the Food Service Industry.
And I do not agree. It seems you are putting raising of the minimum wage in a vacuum. BUT as this article points out, if you change one thing…everything else changes with it.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10553
From the Article:
There’s a theory that make raising the minimum wage will result in fewer jobs. And that theory seems to make intuitive sense, that when wages are higher, you know, people hire fewer people. And in isolation that would be true. There’s an assumption economists like to make called ceteris paribus, which means all other things remaining equal, this would happen.
But all other things are never equal. For example, if you raise the minimum wage, people make more money. That’s the first thing that’s not equal. As people make more money, they spend more, they pay more in taxes. The entire character of the economy changes.
Kezha….you should post your comments directly on the write-up, not here at LB where the article doesn’t exist. 🙂
There’s a big difference between raising the minimum wage and doubling the minimum wage.
I also never said anything about how raising the minimum would cause employers to hire less people and then force their remaining employees to work extra hard to do more work in the same time.
Instead I said raising the wage a lot would produce a strong incentive for employees to automate as much as possible. In the same way you’d hire one man and a backhoe to dig a hole instead of 20 men with shovels, restaurants will automate.