Day Traders Diary

12/12/08

The bad news keeps flooding in. Today's weakness is due in part to the Senate voting down the auto bailout last night. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 189 points to 8,375. The S&P 500 declined 19 points to 853, while the Nasdaq Composite dropped 19 points to 1,488. Congress is putting pressure on the White House to dip into the TARP money to save the automakers. Having said that, GM is down 14% and Ford is down 6%, but it could've been much worse. Analysts are out downgrading the autos ahead of a possible bankruptcy. More terrible economic news. The producer price index took another drop. The Fed has gone from worrying about inflation to deflation. Retail sales dropped 2% for the week. Retail sales have declined for five straight weeks. KB Toys is set to liquidate themselves. Best Buy had their earnings estimates raised at Keybanc. That's weird. More job cuts from Bank of America, Fairchild Semi, and Las Vegas Sands. Bank of America gives billions in bonuses to the Merrill Lynch brokers to keep them, then turns around and lays off 35,000 workers? The financials are all modestly lower. US Bancorp and Capital One were both downgraded. After the first half an hour the Dow was down just 90 points. The Nasdaq declined just a point as a select number of techs are inching into the green. Through the morning the averages remained range bound with the Dow down 100 points. The Nasdaq is unchanged. GM and Ford are rebounding slowly as it seems the White House will try to help out the automakers. In the afternoon the averages actually moved into the green a couple of times. Resilience. In the last hour, the Dow jumped 80 points, then sold off when Ecuador defaulted on their debt, then rebounded once again. Very resilient market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 64 points at 8,629, leaving it off nearly 0.1% from last Friday's close. The S&P 500 climbed 6 points to 879, giving it a 0.4% rise on the week. The Nasdaq Composite advanced 32 points, or 2.2%, to 1,540, leaving the technology-laden index up 2.1% from a week ago.

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