Markets are looking for a reason to be negative, but opening losses are melting away. A big reason might be Amazon, which announced a blowout earnings quarter after the bell yesterday and is up 11%. 4th quarter US GDP came in below analyst expectations and seemed a good reason to send stocks lower, but the 2.6% growth rate is really not something for investors to fret about, and they quickly dismissed that number as a reason to sell. So markets have recovered to being mixed and close to unchanged. Perhaps the biggest negative story out there is that earnings growth of corporate America has slowed dramatically. Some of that is due to a reduction in capital spending in the energy sector and some is related to the effects of a strong dollar for those companies that sell in international markets. If corporate earning growth slows, it could bode negative for stocks moving forward this year. Expect markets to drift lower today as investors continue to focus on what might go wrong. Oil is up about 1% while gold has recovered slightly from the battering it took yesterday.
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