Good morning. Happy Wednesday.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mostly up. China dropped 2% and India 1.1%. Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea and Singapore did well. Half of Europe was closed today. The markets that traded were mixed. Italy and Russia moved up. France moved down. Futures here in the States point towards a positive open for the cash market.
The dollar down. Oil and copper are down. Gold and silver are down.
The Dow, SPX and MID hit new all time highs yesterday. The RUT is close, and the Nas has a little more work to do to take out its dot com bubble high.
The indicators have moved off their lows but have to continue moving up to support the market’s strength.
Energy stocks have improved…not hard considering the hole they were in. Can they continue in the face of Saudi Arabia telling the world they will not decrease production even if oil dropped to $20?
Biotechs have weakened a bunch lately.
Bias remains to the upside. I’m watching the indicators. They need to climb back to their highs. Otherwise the upside will be limited in terms of both time and price movement.
You know the routine here. Today is a half day…tomorrow is a day off. Enjoy. I’ll be here for the open and first hour. Then I’m off to the ski slopes.
Stock headlines from barchart.com…
BAE Systems (BAESY +0.07%) was awarded a contract worth up to $1.2 billion from the U.S. Army for the manufacturing and development of 289 Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicles, or AMPVs.
Virgin America (VA -0.36%) was initiated with a ‘Buy’ at Deutsche Bank with a price target of $44,
Sy Jacobs reported a 9.2% passive stake in Southern Missouri Bancorp (SMBC -2.53%) .
Perry Ellis (PERY -0.20%) files to sell 1.5 million shares of common stock for holders.
Oz Management reported a 5.39% passive stake in Qunar (QUNR -1.19%) .
The WSJ reported that Sony (SNE +0.38%) is mulling sale of its music publishing business that owns the copyrights to most of the Beatles’ songs and is estimated to be worth between $1.5 billion and $2 billion.
Canaan VII LP reported a 12.6% stake in LendingClub (LC -4.07%) .
Gabelli reported a 5.86% stake in Volcano (VOLC +0.22%) .
Cal-Maine Foods (CALM +0.64%) reported Q2 EPS of 76 cents, weaker than consensus of 85 cents.
Earnings and Economic Numbers from seekingalpha.com…
Today’s economic calendar:
7:00 MBA Mortgage Applications
8:30 Initial Jobless Claims
9:45 Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index
10:30 EIA Petroleum Inventories
11:30 Results of $29B, 7-Year Note Auction
12:00 PM EIA Natural Gas Inventory
NYSE closes at 1:00 PM SIFMA closes 2:00 PM
Notable earnings before today’s open: none
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 (Dec 24)”
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Jason,
Ooooo Ski slopes… Sounds Fun!
Happy Holidays always,
Jack
You know, this run to 18k in the Dow is a candidate for a test in Jan ’15. The planned events in ’14 seem to call for a good year end, then who cares?. The macro drivers for next year are not obvious, but it will take something inspiring to pull things into a set of beliefs that will bring the chumps into the market and keep them invested.
I am looking at some things like TAN which are substitutes for energy, electricity etc. The Fed will not rise rates early in ’15. Housing at the entry level is in the tank. What does it all mean??
Happy holidays to everyone here. I’m heading out to my uncle’s ranch here in my native Mexico. It looks like the double milestone did indeed play out this year as the dow first hit its first 1,000 point marker topping 17,000 for the first time on the session before 4th of July holiday. And now, as of yesterday its second 1,000 point marker right before Christmas. Have a good trip Jason, and as always, look forward always reading your work.