El..........
Another Bull-Market Report,
these folks seem to like CPQ!
RichieH
COMMENTARY
This market should be down 300 points today. What? Sure. The bond market was slammed today – the economic numbers came out and they were robust! The bond market is always worried about inflation so with too much growth bond investors are worried that the Fed will be forced to raise rates to slow things down. Crazy, huh? That's the way it is and always has been. And with bonds down, rates went up to close at 5.67%, much higher than the 5.50% rate that we were concerned with and closer to the 5.75% level that many other say is so critical.
But we feel great. Despite the interest rate situation the market came way back from being 70 points down to close up 18. The Nasdaq was even more impressive with many of the Internet stocks surging again. And overall, the market has been basically unchanged for over a week, even though it seems like things are lower. IF the market can survive for a few weeks and IF rates start falling again, which many market pundits predict, we could have the mother of all rallies in stocks!
If you want volatility, go no further than eBay (EBAY). The range for the stock was $306 to $354 today. Wow. We had thought it was going to split today, but we were off by a day. Look for the 3-1 split to take effect tomorrow. Amazon (AMZN) and Yahoo were very strong again, both up 4%. This makes our recent buy stops in the low to mid 90's look really good!
DLJ upgraded the entire financial sector so they were all up. American Express (AXP), Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (MWD), Merrill Lynch (MER), Citigroup (C), Lehman Brothers (LEH), all had nice moves upwards.
Intel (INTC) was downgraded and fell 3.50 to $117. It has really been weak lately and Compaq (CPQ) continues on sale, down another 2 to close at $33. We are not happy about this, but at the same time, we know that all of our stocks can't set new highs every week. We just think that this current pull-back is giving us an opportunity to pick up shares of a wonderful firm 30% below its all-time high, set earlier this year.
The standouts were Texas Instruments (TXN), up 3.3% to $92, Citigroup (C) up 4.5% to $61 and Cisco (CSCO) up 1.7% to $99.
Exodus was big, jumping 11% to close at $81.50 after announcing a $200 million convertible bond offering, having to pay only 5% interest. The market loved it. Preview Travel (PTVL) was up 13% to $23 and Broadcast.com (BCST) shot higher by 12 points or 14% to close at $95. The firm will be broadcasting Rush Limbaugh and Art Bell on the Internet. We feel that if they can do these two shows, there is no limit to what they can do. And we can't see any significant competition at the moment. Now we're up 56% in less than 3 weeks on this puppy! We hereby raise our price target from $105 to $125, 32% higher than the current price. Here's the article about Rush: biz.yahoo.com
As we review today's report, there really isn't much exciting news today as the market is awaiting the jobs report at the end of the week on Friday. But the good thing about our business is that there is sure to be some news tomorrow!
Good investing this week.
Todd Shaver
The Bull Market Report
Washington, DC USA
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