Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Morning Market Comment 1/23/07

Stock futures have come off the lows of the morning.

Better than expected earnings from companies like Bank of America (BAC) and relief that things weren't worse at Texas Instruments (TXN) may be having a preliminary positive impact in getting futures off their earlier lows. S&P futures down just a half, and Dow futures down 9... Nasdaq futures are UNchanged.

Profit rose more than 13 percent at JNJ; EMC's numbers were also better than expected. The bad boy of the day if Alcatel-Lucent where sales at the world's largest telecommunications company fell in the 4th quarter and the company lost money. ALU is down 10%. Ok, so you add a little Oui, Oui to the picture, but you still have about half the picture being the McGinn legacy of Looo-looo-(Art Carney)Lucent and what do you get? Pure non performance as usual.

More important than the stock market... dollar falling today.. EuroFX is up 74 points; gold is taking off, up nearly $10/oz. More in a seperate post.

Energy also up again. It's winter, it's cold - natural gas is leading the way higher with a gain of 4%. But crude for good measure is up 1.6%. Yesterday we fully discussed COT, over the weekend the situation with strong gasoline demand, etc so nothing out there that says we need something to blow up in the Middle East to get the price to move higher.

By the way, the password of the day continues to be (in my best whispering voice): Ethanol.

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