Good morning. Happy Monday.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mostly up. Japan, Hong Kong, India and Taiwan rallied more than 1%. Europe is currently posting big, across-the-board gains. Greece is up better than 6%; Germany, France, Stockholm, Denmark, Finland, Spain and Amsterdam are up more than 2%; London, Austria, Switzerland, Prague, Poland, Turkey, Italy, Belgium and Portugal are up more than 1%. Futures here in the States point towards a big gap up open for the cash market.
S&P Select – Week in Review
The dollar is up. Oil and copper are up. Gold is down, silver is up. Bonds are down.
It’s all about Greece this morning. Over the weekend, the Greek Prime Minister submitted a new reforms package to its foreign creditors. At the very least this signals a willingness to make further concessions and avoid a default. European markets are posting solid gains.
The big health insurers are in the news. ANTM has made a third offer to CI (CI rejected it). AET made an takeover offer for HUM. And UNH has made already made an offer for AET. Consolidating from five huge companies to 3 would boost profits as redundancies could be eliminated…but fewer participants leads to less competition and could eventually lead to higher prices for consumers. These are not slam-dunk deals.
We enter this new week with the market being mixed. A few indexes hit new highs last week while the large caps lagged. Some indicators would support a rally, while others are lagging enough to suggest the participation rate is low and internally there isn’t huge support for a rally attempt. Greece is obviously very important in the near term. The S&P is going to gap up 15 points today. It could gap down the same amount tomorrow if European leaders reject their recent submittals.
Overall the market is mostly neutral and range bound. Rallies get sold, dips get bought. We have needed to keep trades shorter term. This type of action could last another week, it could last all summer. Make appropriate adjustments. More after the open.
Stock headlines from barchart.com…
MetLife (MET -0.90%) was upgraded to ‘Outperform’ from ‘Sector Perform’ at RBC Capital.
Piper Jaffray keeps an ‘Overwweight’ on shares of Facebook (FB -0.47%) and raises the price target on the stock to $120 from $92.
Symantec (SYMC -1.59%) was downgraded to ‘Sell’ from ‘Neutral’ at UBS.
Marsh & McLennan (MMC -0.69%) was downgraded to ‘Neutral’ from ‘Buy’ at Goldman Sachs.
STMicroelectronics (STM -1.36%) was upgraded to ‘Equal Weight’ from ‘Underweight’ at Barclays.
SanDisk (SNDK -1.98%) was upgraded to ‘Buy’ from ‘Hold’ at Summit Research.
Micron (MU unch) was downgraded to ‘Sell’ from ‘Neutral’ at Goldman Sachs.
Cigna (CI -0.74%) jumped over 9% in pre-market trading after the company rejected a $37 billion takeover bid from Anthem Inc.
Williams Cos. (WMB -1.29%) surged 26% in pre-market trading afer the company rejected a $48 billion stock-based takeover from Kelcy Warren.
Carnival (CCL +0.62%) rose over 3% in pre-market trading after Deutsche Bank raised its recommendation on the stock to ‘Buy’ saying the company may beat forecasts for Q2 earnings.
AK Steel (AKS -3.89%) lowered guidance on Q2 EPS to a loss of -37 cents to -42 cents, a larger loss than consensus of -27 cents.
Mario Investments reported a 16.6% stake in MRC Global (MRC +0.13%).
Baxalta (BXLT) will replace QEP Resources (QEP -0.49%) in the S&P 500 as of the close of trading Tuesday, June 30.
Glazer Capital reported a 6.1% passive stake in Global Defense & National Security Systems (GDEF +0.57%) .
Indus Capital reported an 8.13% passive stake in Jamba (JMBA +0.57%).
Point72 Asset reported a 5.0% passive stake in WPX Energy (WPX -1.56%).
Discovery Group reported a 5.1% stake in Aerohive (HIVE -3.47%).
Earnings and Economic Numbers from seekingalpha.com…
Today’s economic calendar:
8:30 Chicago Fed National Activity Index
10:00 Existing Home Sales
Notable earnings before today’s open: KBH, KMX
Notable earnings after today’s close: SONC
Other…
today’s upgrades/downgrades from briefing.com
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers