Sunday, November 18, 2007

Fed Exp Tells Us Expected News

Last Friday the stock market managed to jump around like it had its feet on hot coals. We consider this was caused by the options expiration. Of course, there are several forces on the market pulling it in different directions.

Early Friday, Federal Express, a small delivery company that you may or may not have heard of, announced they would have lower earnings in this quarter and for the full year. The company said "soaring" fuel costs combined with lower freight orders to lower their earnings. For this, the market decided its share price should be less by the end of the day, but only by about a little less than 5%.

This news had a detrimental effect on the Transports for the day, which were down by over 1.5%. This compares to the higher Industrials and most other indexes. That doesn't really match up with the broader market which had negative breadth.

In our quest to bring you some information that is useful to you we always try to share information from other sources. Today, we see that CNN Money had a little article about the ABX indexes. These are the indexes that are based on some mortgage debt. The five pages of info give some nice basic info on the indexes.

The real estate market is part of the fabric of the country and will be part of the news over the next several months. The WSJ has an article on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that may be interesting to you if it appears in the Monday paper. We'll try to bring more info on this tomorrow.

We are expecting a little less activity in the market this week as the Thanksgiving holiday may keep many away from trading--this may be totally wrong but we are not expecting too much.

FSI:
Arithmetic: 95.77
Market Cap: 95.44

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Glenn,

Was cathcing up on posts and couldn't remember if it was a post or offline email but I believe I inquired about our so-called safe money market accounts (SIV's) and how safe they are. Then I read your post about GE returning 96 cents on the dollar and then eating the costs by holding the investments in their pension fund. I'm sure that made GE employees happy.

it seems the news is mounting in favor of the bear case.

Erick

Glenn said...

The news on GE is surprising even though they are well within their right to reduce the principal on this asset class. GE just reduced the value of the asset so whoever owned it was going to be down about 4%.

The bear is gaining steam but there is still the open possibility for a rally right now. The Monday evening post is coming right up with that story.