Before the Open (Sep 9)

Good morning. Happy Monday. Hope you had a nice weekend.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed up across the board. China rallied 3.4%, Indonesia 2.9%, Japan 2.5% and India, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea more than 1%. Europe is currently mixed; most indexes haven’t moved much from their unchanged levels. Greece and the Czech Republic are up, France and Switzerland are down. Futures here in the States point towards an up open for the cash market.

The dollar is down slightly. Oil is down, copper is up. Gold and silver are down.
I don’t have anything to add to the comments I made over the weekend in the weekly report. The market moved up 4 of 5 days last week. The bulls are breathing again, but lower highs and lower lows are still in place. The bears have had several opportunities to take control, but they haven’t been able to do it yet. Dare I say the longer it takes for the bears to take over, the higher the odds the bulls push prices back to the highs. In other words, the bears need to seize the opportunities when they have them and not let them slip away.
Syria is still on the table…we’ve seen a couple times the last couple weeks what news can quickly do to the market.
I don’t have a strong bias in the very near term. Last week’s bounce gave the bulls a little cushion to work with, so nobody’s back is against the wall as we head into the new week.
Charts of individual stocks have improved, but the best looking patterns appear on stocks that aren’t necessarily great trading candidates.
Overall, things have neutralized in the very near term. More after the open.
Stock headlines from barchart.com…
EOG Resources (EOG +0.18%) was upgraded to “Overweight” from “Equal Weight” at Morgan Stanley.
Phillips 66 (PSX -0.66%) was downgraded to “Hold” from “Buy” at Argus due to valuation.
Micron (MU +0.59%) was upgraded to “Neutral” from “Negative” at Susquehanna.
Brocade (BRCD -2.61%) was upgraded to “Outperform” from “Sector Perform” at RBC Capital.
Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB -0.32%) was downgraded to “Market Perform” from “Outperform” at Raymond James.
Estee Lauder (EL +0.31%) was upgraded to “Buy” from “Neutral” at Citigroup who raised their price target on the stock to $78 from $75.
The WSJ reported that AT&T (T +0.21%) has gotten tentative approval from the U.S. Department of Labor to contribute up to $9.5 billion of preferred stock to its pension plan, which would make the company’s plan nearly fully funded.
Delta Air Lines (DAL -1.78%) rose 4% in after-hours trading Friday when it was announced that it replace BMC Software (BMC +0.46%) in S&P 500 as of the close on Sep 10.
Yum! Brands (YUM -0.33%) reported that its August same-store sales declined an estimated 10% for the China Division.
Earnings and Economic Numbers from seekingalpha.com…
Today’s economic calendar:
3:00 PM Consumer Credit
Notable earnings before today’s open: HITK, HOV
Notable earnings after today’s close: CASY, FIVE, FLOW, HDS, IRET, PANW, PBY, PPHM, PVH
Other…
today’s upgrades/downgrades from briefing.com
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers