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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Voltaire who wrote (35043)	3/31/2001 3:19:52 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Another Quarter, a New Game? SmartMoney.com - Weekend Report Saturday March 31, 12:41 pm Eastern Time By Igor Greenwald <<LIKE A LOSING football team throwing into the wind, Wall Street starts a new quarter dreaming of comebacks. Unlike a losing football team, it can't get the breeze at its back by trading goalposts. The markets' quest for useful economic data resumes on Monday with the release of the National Association of Purchasing Management Index. This gauge of manufacturing activity had been expected to snap a streak of five monthly declines, but that was before its regional Chicago variant came in Friday looking its sickliest in many years. ``The fact that the Chicago number fell 8 points to a level not seen since the Rust Belt recession of two decades ago is a serious concern,'' says Timothy E. Rogers, chief economist at Briefing.com. Richard E. Cripps, chief market strategist for the Legg Mason brokerage in Baltimore, is waiting for the hand-wringing to pick up where it left off earlier this month. ``...If [the NAPM] is anything like Chicago, you're going to have a great deal of speculation that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates sooner than their regular meeting in May,'' he predicts. That should be good for a question or two on Wednesday, when Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan testifies before the Senate Finance Committee, ostensibly on trade policy. But it's not trade policy that's turning Uncle Alan from sainted savior into second-guessed scapegoat. Rather, the senators may want Greenspan to discuss this puzzling equation: 3 rate cuts in the last quarter = a 12% drop in the S&P 500 Index. Perhaps they haven't read the epically egregious paean to Greenspan's wisdom penned by Goldman Sachs strategist Abby Joseph Cohen after the last rate cut: 'More!' cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered more, But Alan knew the score and the audience was awed; They saw his face grow stern and bold, they saw his intellect strain, And they knew that Alan wouldn't let the economy go low again. Last Tuesday the indexes obliged by rallying on surprisingly strong consumer confidence figures, the first time in a long while that investors have actually cheered a sign of economic strength. Like so may of this year's rallies, the advance came to an abrupt end the next day as recession fears resurfaced. For all the grief they've suffered in the last three months, investors now know roughly what they knew at the end of December: that the economy is wallowing unevenly and unpredictably, prompting a rush of earnings warnings. Next Friday's employment report won't dramatically expand that base of knowledge even if the unemployment rate nudges up to 4.3% as Briefing.com's Rogers expects. That leaves the NAPM to set the week's agenda. ``The worst of it will be if it comes in ambiguous: not bad enough to get the Fed to cut interest rates and yet bad enough that it sends analysts back to the drawing board cutting earnings estimates,'' warns Legg Mason's Cripps. Like many other pros, Cripps has been anxiously waiting for the crescendo of panic selling that's expected to accompany a bear-market bottom. But the fear needed to generate such selling is missing, he adds: ``We deal with a lot of individual investors and you just don't see it — it's almost eerie.'' A surprise warning from a widely held bellwether like a Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO - news) or a Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT - news) could still do the trick, Cripps suggests. Speaking of which, Bill Gates' next public engagement comes Wednesday at something called the Computer-Human Interaction Conference. Representing humans will be Microsoft Senior VP Craig Mundie, among others. Aside from the expected piggie-pile of warnings, it will be slim pickings on the earnings front again next week, with an early focus on retailers: Circuit City (NYSE:CC - news) Monday, Best Buy (NYSE:BBY - news) Tuesday and Bed Bath & Beyond (NASDAQ:BBBY - news) Wednesday. On Thursday, Alcoa (NYSE:AA - news) is expected to earn 44 cents for each of those 2.37 million shares its former boss and current Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has finally decided to sell. Also scheduled: Dell (NASDAQ:DELL - news) executives will brief analysts Wednesday on their strategy for extending the stock's gravity-defying rally. Miss that, and you'll have no recourse but to invite Michael Dell for dinner at your house...>>