Overheard On The Street
Here’s what they’re saying at mid-day:
Brian Conroy, Head of Listed Trading,
J.P. Morgan: "You’ve got some of the tech stocks stronger on the back of
the Microsoft announcement, and that got the Nasdaq market going a little bit.
But across the board, the banks are down a little bit, and there continue to be
concerns. You had pre-announcements last night and this morning from Kodak and
Lexmark and the market is still very nervous. You’ve got people adjusting their
portfolios going into Friday’s end of the quarter, so there’s just no clear
direction today."
Harry Laubscher, Market Analyst, Tucker
Anthony: "We are moving into the quarterly window dressing period, and
normally we would be seeing the market acting pretty well. It certainly is not
acting so well at the present time, but the Dow, as a result of last Friday’s
reversal, is still operating under a bullish signal. It would have to drop down
to 10,600 to reverse that. We are still in hopes that we will have some further
upside movement here over the next several days.
"We are, however, encouraging people to be wary of some of these high PE
technology stocks like Cisco, Intel, and Sun Micro. We still think they are very
much over valued, and during any periods of strength, we are encouraging people
to walk away from them. We still like oils, and we think that the utilities are
going to try to better their recent highs."
Charles Payne, President and Head
Analyst, Wall Street Strategies: "Looking at today’s session, we’re in a
really precarious spot. Earlier in the year, after the market melted down,
investors really had to grapple with valuations along with inflation and, of
course, the ever present earnings problems. Really the way investors dealt with
all this was by looking to blue-chip stocks for safety, and as it turns out,
they may have jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire as one blue-chip
play after another has warned.
"Either it’s the euro or something else, and now investors are in a
really interesting spot because, of course, they’re uncomfortable staying long
in the high-flyers, and at the same time they can’t park their money in the blue
chips anymore. What you’ll probably see is a whole lot of individual investor
money join the institutional money which has been on the sidelines for at least
five months, and then they’ll just sort of pick their spots until all these
problems are resolved."