Market Close

The market did not react to well to the news this morning that the European Central Bank dumped $500 billion dollars into the financial markets of Europe today. That is an awful lot of liquidity to be dumped into the system at one time. Reminds me of what a Doctor does to a patient that has lost too much blood, they do a transfusion. And the European financial sectors got a blast up the arm big time today. Is the patient that sick? Could be…

Weakness was abundant today until some late day short covering and short term buyers. Still not looking to good here. Tonight we’ll go over the charts once again to show where we are on the major indices.

Mid-day Update

The market continues it’s weakness and mini bounces aren’t holding.  GS had OK earnings, but their conference call wasn’t as positive as most would have liked.  As of this posting, the share price is still dropping, down over 5%.  The European Central Bank injected $500B into banks today to provide liquidity through year end.  That’s $500 Billion, wow!  Again, there were those cheering this event, but man oh man oh man!  That is a bit scary to me.  I sure hope somebody out there knows how to keep this all from unraveling too quickly.  I really do. 

I’m going to jump back into the pit now, because there is money to made no matter what this market is doing.  More updates later, but there isn’t any more economic data slated for the rest of the day.

Pre Market - December 18th 2007

Housing starts data has been released and dropped 3.7%, building permits dropped 1.5% which is the lowest since June 1993.

Best Buy (BBY) released earnings and they came in better than the analysts had expected, but one needs to remember that the earnings expectations of Best Buy and many other retailers had already been lowered. So the beat on earnings is still lower than what was expected 6 months ago.

Goldman Sachs (GS), one of the few financial firms able to isolate itself from the sub prime crisis (so far) released earnings as well and they were ahead of expectations. Any rise in the financial sectors will likely continue to be sold into strength.

What we also received this morning is the retail sales data for the year so far.. REDBOOK Retail Sales figures for weak ending December 15th show year over year growth of 1.3% (much lower growth than expected). The month to date sales are down 0.6% compared to last month. Recall the commentary from last week where retail sales was discussed and that it was likely that the higher number in November was likely ‘borrowed’ from December. It appears this is what is happening with this updated Redbook sales data.