{"id":5875,"date":"2012-08-10T07:55:15","date_gmt":"2012-08-10T12:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leavittbrothers.com\/blog\/?p=5875"},"modified":"2012-08-10T07:55:15","modified_gmt":"2012-08-10T12:55:15","slug":"before-the-open-aug-10-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/?p=5875","title":{"rendered":"Before the Open (Aug 10)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning. Happy Friday.<\/span>
\nThe Asian\/Pacific markets closed mixed and with a slight bearish bias. Japan dropped 1%; nothing else moved 1%. Europe is currently mostly down. Greece is up almost 1%; France, Belgium, Germany and Stockholm are down. Futures here in the States point towards a moderate gap down open for the cash market.
\n<\/span>
\nThe dollar is up. Oil and copper are down. Gold and silver are down.<\/span>
\nJCP posted a much bigger loss than expected. The stock is up in pre market trading. Ron Johnson, the CEO who came over from AAPL, has been a total disaster.<\/span>
\nIBM is interested in buying RIM’s enterprise services unit.<\/span>
\nUS regulators have told five of the countries biggest banks (Bank of America, Goldmam Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan) to develop plans for dealing with series financial problems, emphasizing the banks could not depend on the government for help.<\/span>
\nIt’s been a pretty good week. The market rallied nicely Monday and Tuesday and then traded quietly and range bound Thursday and Friday. The Dow and S&P have been stair-stepping up for a couple months. The Nas recently broke out of a conoslidation range. The Russell is trying to reverse a series of lower highs and lower lows. As long as today isn’t a huge down day, another up week will be registered – the fifth consecutive for the S&P. <\/span>
\nMany key groups have improved, and many stocks have improved even more. In fact we actually have some decent charts to play. But this is still a news dominated market. If left alone, the market would probably move up. But negative news out of Europe can come at any time, so we need to expect something bad to happen eventually. <\/span>
\nHere are the daily index charts.<\/span>
\n\"\"
\nheadlines at Yahoo Finance<\/a><\/span>
\nheadlines at MarketWatch<\/a><\/span>
\ntoday’s upgrades\/downgrades<\/a><\/span>
\nthis week’s Earnings<\/a><\/span>
\nthis week’s Economic Numbers<\/a><\/span>
\n