MARKET COMMENT
May 16, 2007
A little financial wizardry today as bulls were stimulated to
buy primarily by big money commitments from Icahn and
Buffett in railroads and Lampert’s
gambit with Citigroup.
As to the latter
I wonder what Sandy Weil would think if C gets broken-up into little
pieces.
He worked hard to build the
monolithic financial services firm.
But,
he’s no sentimentalist when there’s money to be made.
Then there’s the small Bausch & Lomb deal
where the company gets taken private for $4.5 billion [small potatoes, eh?].
Elsewhere, the Fed’s Hoenig
cheered investors by saying the economy will get stronger.
“The consumer [Chucky, if you please] has
continued to be a strong supporter of growth”, he continued.
“But [there’s always one of those], gasoline
prices are again on the rise and could work their way into core inflation.”
Huh?
I
thought we were supposed to ignore energy.
I guess you can’t eliminate energy costs from all products now can
you.
And continuing with Fed affairs, former chairman Greenspan
has accepted a consulting job with bond market mega-firm PIMCO.
The biggest buyer meets the biggest
seller--that’s a neat trick.
We also got upgrades in airlines and a better industrial
production number.
All this gave dollar
bulls a chance to rally Bucky and smack gold lower.
All eyes and headlines remain on the DJIA, but that’s not
where the real action is.
Overseas some markets
stay on fire making mincemeat of performance comparisons to US averages.
If you want to focus on BRIC [Brazil,
Russia, India and China] countries you might do
better to buy them individually.
There’s
a great difference between the economy of Russia and perhaps the others for
example.
Now I could put up more US stock sector charts but the real
action is overseas.
The global stock
market boom continues even if unevenly.
Don’t forget this is options expiration week and the usual weirdness
could occur late tomorrow and into to Friday.
Have a pleasant evening.
Disclaimer:
Among
other issues, the ETF Digest maintains long or short positions in:
GLD, ILF, INP, FXI, EWY and EWC.