Perfect so far.
We went into yesterday’s close a little more bullish than we had intended but, as I said in the monring post: “we really felt 7,750 would hold” and the Dow finished the day at 7,789 so right on target so far. We pretty much filled all our gaps from last Wednesday’s close and today we’ll see if we can avoid testing our lower levels entirely as the earnings reports start to come in. Last nightwe got a pretty much in-line miss from AA and the miss we (but not analysts) expected from MOS. JNPR raised guidance to the upper end of expectations, RTdoubled low expectationsand BBBY beat by 25% as cost cutting trumped flat revenues.
So far so-so I say! So-so is better than expected in this market and we did all our panicking in early March so somewhere between 6,600 and 8,600 we will discover the truth of earnings. Today we already have a beat by JOSB (expected by us as job seekers buy suits) and FDO hit the expected 33% gain in profits over last year. STX is going to have a tough time hitting the .22 target set fro them and SGR is a wildcard but should do all right and outlook will hopefully be good. After the close today we hear from PBY with very low expectations and WDFC, which will be interesting as expectations are dismal for them.
Thursday is a little more interesting with MOV and VIP in the morning and CHINA, EXM and DNA at the close but it will be too late by then as we’re closed on Friday and it’s already Passover so tomorrow is not likely to be very eventful. So today is the day that we will see which way the market goes. The bears were out in force yesterday but they failed to break the will of the bears and the volume was so low you could really throw out the whole day’s action as meaningless. We’ll be watching our gap fill levels to see if the hold (Dow is 7,750, S&P 812, Nas1,525, NYSE 5,100 and RUT 428) and below that would be our old targets of Dow 7,636, S&P 805, Nas 1,525, NYSE 5,075 and Russell 420. Holding those levels would be very impressive but, if not, we’re sure to at least test the 50 dmas of our indexes, which just happens to be another 2.5% drop…
