Showing posts with label Best Stocks To Watch In 2012. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Best Stocks To Watch In 2012. Show all posts

Wall Street Too Lazy To Sleep

Stocks poised themselves for a higher opening Thursday, but it may be that Wall Street simply has gotten too indifferent to care about the recent selloff.
Stocks have fallen in four straight sessions, but only one of them amounted to anything of any consequence. Aside from Tuesday’s 20-point selloff by the S&P 500 Index(SPX), Wall Street has behaved much the way it did Wednesday, when the index hugged the flatline for most of the session before finishing just 3 points lower on the close.
Futures suggest an eight-point improvement from the open, which would push the S&P back above the 1000-point mark, a level that has manifested a bit of psychological – if not actually technical – resistance.
On the other hand, the market has been – and can be expected to continue – battling a host of headwinds: Sluggish trading, owing to seasonal factors. An uptick in risk aversion. A speculative bubble forming that’s formed in some financials. And a rise in the kind of momentum moves in individual issues that smacks of day traders with no real commitment to fundamentals.
The one thing that has been working the bulls’ corner has been the economic data. This week’s reading on industrial trends showed the manufacturing sector of the domestic economy improved for the first time since the recession started. Wednesday’s release of the minutes of the last FOMC meeting suggested the central bank had evidenced increased confidence the recession has ended.
The stumbling block could be the consumer, especially as an iteration of the labor market. Friday brings the release of the monthly nonfarm payrolls report, expected to show that job losses persisted in August, but at a slower pace than in prior months; the forecast calls for a decline of 233,000 jobs, versus a loss of 247,000 in July.
The weekly unemployment claims reading came in just about where expected, showing 566,000 people without jobs filed claims for t! he week, down from 570,000 the prior week.
Monthly same-store sales figures from retailers can be expected to show the reticence of consumers amid the persistent weakness in the labor markets.
Furthering the bearish case, risk aversion has percolated over the course of the week’s action. Treasuries have risen in price for much of this week, although they have retreated a bit Thursday on some profit-taking. The decline in risk appetite has manifested itself more dramatically in the gold market, a conventional safe-haven for the inflation bugs. Gold prices broke out Wednesday, and continued to rally Thursday.
The session’s equity action has a constructive look on the open, but there’s a real chance that, with dwindling trading levels in the last week of the summer season, investors could opt to book some profits on any improvement, and think about answering the call of the open road.

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