Day Traders Diary

1/16/09

U.S. stocks are set to bounce on Friday, continuing the prior session's bounce back as investors hope the government's moves to shore up two of the country's biggest banks will work. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 126 points to 8,339. The S&P 500 advanced 14 points to 857. The Nasdaq Composite climbed 19 points to 1,531. Bank of America is modestly higher after receiving $20 billion more in TARP money. The dividend is down to a penny. Citigroup is modestly higher after losing $8.3 billion. Charles Schwab beat by a penny and continues to make money. All the banks opened higher, but soon reversed course. HSBC is lower on a downgrade. JP Morgan and Wells Fargo are in the red. Are they next to receive more TARP money? The insurance stocks are actually performing well. Outside the financials, things look much better. The techs look good. Intel is modestly higher on in-line earnings. The commodities look good. After the first half an hour, the averages remained in the green, but off the highs.
The financials look precarious. Through the morning the averages remained in the green even as more banks like Bank of America, HSBC, JP Morgan, American Express, Barclays, and Wells Fargo move lower. Visa and Mastercard are both down over 5% on downgrades. Entering the lunch hour, the rally started to fizzle. Many commodities have turned lower. A number of the big banks are making new lows. During the lunch hour, all the major averages moved into the red. It's not looking good. Plenty of layoffs. Circuit City will be liquidated with 35,000 employees losing their jobs. Best Buy is up on this news. GE Capital is cutting 11,000 jobs. AMD and Hertz are also cutting jobs. Entering the last hour, the averages were back in the green, but not the financials. In the last hour the averages kept improving. One financial acting better is Barclays. The company came out and said they would beat estimates causing the stock to rally. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 68 points at 8,281, leaving the index down 3.7% for the week. The S&P 500 gained 6 points to 850, leaving the broad market index with a weekly loss of 4.5%. The Nasdaq Composite added 17 points, or 1.2%, to 1,529, but down 2.7% on the week.

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