Housing Numbers Due the Next Two Days

Monday started rather poorly on Wall Street but after the early morning sell off, the buyers stepped in to start trading the day away.  Prices trended up for most of the rest of the day but just barely up.  The major indexes we follow did not manage to close green but were much better than where they started the day.

There is not much to report this evening so we’ll concentrate on the upcoming news over the next few days.  First, the housing reports that we like so much, on Tuesday we get to see the March existing home sales which are projected to show a drop of about 3% after a bounce last month of 5.25% in February.  There are also some retail sales reports on Tuesday that may shed some light on the consumer.  Then there will be the April Conference Board Consumer Confidence report.  With the President’s approval ratings down so far, we would expect some downward push in this report and consensus does show a modest drop from 107.2 down to 106.

On Wednesday we get to see the March Durable Goods Orders expected to show a modest rise of 1.6%.  We see that the other report out on Wednesday is the March new home sales which are also expected to show a higher number to the tune of 3.2%.  We think these two numbers sort of go hand in hand as the orders for durable goods many times go into new homes.

In the afternoon on Wednesday, we get a look at the Fed’s Beige Book which should provide for more speculation on what the Fed might be looking at when it thinks about the course of short term interest rates. More as we go through the week and there are some important numbers coming out this week but we just can’t tell how the market may react due to the wild speculation out there currently.

We would say that the market should be very volatile over the next several weeks as we feel a turn is here.  When the market turns, there usually are some violent moves in the opposite direction.   We would recommend caution if you need to trade.  Otherwise we offer our standard message…

Be careful out there…

Dow Industrials:  11,336.32  -11.13
RYVNX:   18.29
RYAIX:  21.85
TLT:  85.14
BEGBX:  13.16  (the dollar is weakening)