Stock Market Analysis – 03-10-2009
Quite a bounce today on news that Citigroup made a profit for the first 2 months of the year. So they need billions of dollars in bailouts, but then they go make a profit and will probably pay themselves big bonuses as a reward? I’m not sold, but when the market gets desperate for a correction it doesn’t take much to make it happen.
I’d like to say I called this one, but then you’d look back and see that I’ve been leaning towards a bounce for the past week. There are always some people who are very loud and brag about how they call 80% of the swings before they happen. Typically, these people just call reversals every day and don’t include the fact that while they preemptively call 80% of the swings before they happen, they also incorrectly call swings that never materialize 80% of the time too. More often than not, the market never returns back to the point that they made their first call. It’s ok to speculate to yourself, but make sure your money is always on the high percentage play with the market, not against it.
Stock Market Analysis – 01-14-2009
Retailers were worse than expected, Citigroup (C) is falling apart, and oil continues to die. That all adds up to another down day with increasing volume now. The holidays make reading the volume funny, but the rise in volume during the immediate downtrend is unmistakable. On top of all that, after the market close Apple (AAPL) confirmed the fanboy’s most dreaded fear: Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence.
Everyone knows how important Jobs is to the company, but I believe they’ve grown bigger than him now. The roadmap is probably laid out for the next couple years already, and it would take some serious missteps to kill the momentum that they have now. Hope that people overreact to the news and give the stock a beating, and at the very least it will present a nice swing trade. No guarantees on how AAPL will deal with this over the extended timeframe (2+ years), but I still see them as an attractive stock if the market recovers before then.