Stock Market Analysis - 10-16-2008
A late market rally sent the markets soaring. There was solid volume today, but the NYSE ended with slightly more down volume still (46% up vs 50% down). However, the Nasdaq was overwhelmingly up (87% up vs 13% down) as Ballmer sparked the YHOO merger rumors again, only to have MSFT issue an official statement that they have no interest in YHOO. After the market close GOOG also delivered an unexpectedly good earnings report that sent the stock up 10% after hours. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the bounce follow through tomorrow to close out the week, but once again, don’t expect it to last very long. Will it be enough to get another good short opportunity?
Stock Market Analysis - 07-18-2008
Friday was a day where the indexes greatly diverged. Led by GOOG and MSFT, techs tumbled across the board taking the Nasdaq down while the S&P 500 and Dow were mainly unphased. We’ve surpassed one of the lower highs, but we’ll have to start setting higher lows for it to mean anything. That means I’m ready to short on the next downswing, but a quick bounce before 125 will be the signal to wait longer.
Stock Market Analysis - 07-17-2008
The day was up a bit, but the volume support wasn’t there again. While this qualifies as a mild corrective bounce now, it looks like it may be difficult to continue the uptrend with GOOG and MSFT dropping 7% after their earnings calls failed to meet expectations. It’s interesting to me that if you search for “GOOG” at google.com as I’m writing this, the featured news article that comes up is the Fortune/CNNMoney article titled “Analysts: Google investors ‘freaking out for nothing,’” which goes on to say that GOOG is still doing well and you shouldn’t sell your shares.
Of course if you go to any other news site or aggregator they’ll link you to a boring news release with a bland headline, like the one I had above, or to ones that are slightly more negative. Even CNNMoney doesn’t have this as their featured article on the topic, as they have the headline “Google profits slow more than expected” with the positive article as the secondary article. I’m sure Google will say, “it’s all an automated algorithm that selects feature articles,” but it all just seems a little fishy to me. I actually do think selling the shares is an overreaction to a quarterly report, but I just find it an entertaining reminder to get your news from multiple sources since you never know what agenda each single source is pushing. That includes any info you may get out of this site since I’ll be the first to admit that I am very opinionated and biased, but isn’t that the point of having a blog?
Stock Market Analysis - 07-11-2008
After a week of huge pain in the financial sector the market is starting to look even weaker than I thought. FNM and FRE led the charge downwards with the IndyMac collapse foreshadowing a likely future for at least a few other banking companies. Anyone that says we aren’t in a recession now must have their head pretty high up in the clouds. With all of the banking excitement I haven’t even been pointing out the new talks between YHOO and MSFT, but once again they’re going nowhere fast. The market seems pretty desperate for good news right now so we’ll have to see if anyone can deliver.