I discovered a website: http://www.quicken.com/investments/markets/
that gives you minute by minute graphs of the 3 major US stock
exchanges. I check it several times a day to see what is happening.
(I own no stocks) I'm simply fascinated with how the commentary
attempts to explain what is going on. Todays closing commentary is
priceless so I've copied it below for your amusement.
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Close Dow -48.92 at 10525.37, Nasdaq -8.77 at 1881.63, S&P -5.23 at
1157.54: [BRIEFING.COM]
Consider these developments: foreign markets were up strongly
overnight led by Japan's Nikkei, which rallied to its best levels in
seven
months with a gain of 2.6%; Q4 Productivity was revised upward
to 5.2% from 3.5% and unit labor costs were revised
downward to -2.7% from -1.1%; and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan
indicated before the Senate that the economic
recovery is well under way... Why bother to point out these
items? Well, each was a positive development in its own
right, but one would have thought the combination of all those
factors would have prompted another broad-based rally in the
equity market... But alas, they didn't... In fact, the market
spent the majority of today's session on the defensive, seemingly
unnerved by the thought that an economic recovery might
necessitate a Fed tightening sooner rather than later... That
thought was disconcerting because we are just now starting to
receive a steady stream of economic reports that suggest an
economic recovery is taking root; and subsequently, it is
unsettling to think the Fed might raise rates before the economy has
any real chance at gaining momentum... That, at least, was one
of the considerations that stymied the market, but to be fair,
the market's strong, and swift, advance of late has made it
vulnerable to bouts of profit taking... Accordingly, we would
caution against reading too much into the concern surrounding
an eventual Fed tightening... We would also hasten to add
that the market retreated in orderly fashion today and then
made a nice move late in the session to pare its losses... Frankly,
if the market was really concerned about an imminent, and
premature, tightening, we would have expected the selling
pressure to be more severe... Be that as it may, the major
indices still ended the day in negative territory, weighed down by
losses in the software, telecom equipment, biotech, bank,
brokerage, airline, consumer goods, basic materials, and
homebuilding shares... Helping to limit the damage were the
retail, semiconductor, auto, oil drilling, and railroad issues, which
traded with a positive bias... Leading the Dow's decline were
IBM (IBM -2.59), Boeing (BA -1.38), and Procter & Gamble
(PG -1.11)... Separately, the dollar suffered its worst one-day
decline against the yen since October 1998 as talk of
repatriation ahead of Japan's fiscal year-end (Mar. 31) and
recent calls from brokerage firms to increase holdings of
Japanese stocks raise demand for the yen... That demand,
coupled with Greenspan's talk of economic recovery, weighed
heavily on the US Treasury market, which suffered notable
losses across the curve... Tomorrow, the equity market should
take its cue from mid-quarter updates from Intel (INTC +0.02)
and Sun Microsystems (SUNW -0.20) and the February
Employment Report... NYSE Adv/Dec 1598/1564... Nasdaq Adv/Dec 1873/1663.
