Saturday, October 15, 2011

Weekend News 14 Oct


[BRIEFING.COM] The S&P 500 overcame resistance on Friday to score another strong gain, contributing to the broad market's best weekly performance since July 2009.
A positive tone among market participants was perpetuated by more buying in Europe, where the continent's major bourses extended their recent rally.

A commitment early this week by leading eurozone officials to develop a comprehensive plan intended to stabilize precarious conditions and shore up capital at European banks sent a strong signal to global investors. It also got the week started on a strong note -- the stock market rallied more than 3% on Monday for its best single-session percentage gain in almost seven weeks.
Tuesday also ushered in the unofficial start of earnings season when Dow component Alcoa (AA 10.26, +0.16) announced its latest quarterly results after the close.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM 31.89, +0.29) was bid up aggressively ahead of its quarterly announcement on Thursday morning. The diversified financial services giant posted earnings that exceeded what Wall Street had widely expected, but the dubious quality of that beat was a focus of analysts. Concerted selling caused the stock to drop sharply. Given that JPMorgan Chase is widely regarded as the best in its class, many other banks were implicated. The result was a near 5% drop for the KBW Bank Index, which only made a half-hearted attempt to rebound on Friday, when it advanced a relatively tame 0.7%.

Another weekly initial jobless claims count narrowly above 400,000 -- 404,000 to be specific -- had little impact on action during Thursday's trade, but that's mostly because the tally was right in stride with the 406,000 claims that had been widely expected.A superior report from Google (GOOG 591.68, +32.69) helped close out the week on a strong note. Both the top and bottom line bested what had been expected. That sent the stock to its highest level in more than one month and inspired buying in other large-cap tech issues. Collectively, tech stocks climbed 2.1% on Friday.Energy stocks were the best performers on Friday. Their 3.6% climb was helped along by a 3.2% spike in oil prices to almost $87 per barrel. Oil prices ended the week about 5% above where they began it.
Friday's advance marked the fourth gain in five sessions, helping the S&P 500 score a 6% weekly gain. Perhaps more impressive is that the stock market has now advanced in seven of the past nine sessions for a cumulative gain of more than 11%.


Energy
Markets
Central Banks
Politics
  • Obama In Another Country, This Time Uganda. (AFP)
  • Geithner Headed To Paris To Coerce European Leaders On EFSF et al. (Economic Policy Journal)
  • Iran Case, Sign Of U.S. Drug Agency's New Security Role. (Reuters)
HFT/Algo
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