Overheard On The Street
Here’s what they’re saying at mid-day:
John Trammell, Managing Director,
Argonaut Capital Management: “I think today it’s all about the Middle East.
With the report of an attack on a U.S. warship and with the Israeli helicopter
gunship attacks on Arafat’s headquarters, it made everybody worry that a true
shooting war in the Middle East was much closer than we had thought. That caused
sort of an early-morning panic in the U.S. with crude oil briefly up more than
$3 and the Dow down more than 300 points.
“I think you have to look at this in the context of what we’ve had
happen in the last several days. With the earnings warnings that we’ve had from
several major companies and the prospects of higher crude oil prices because of
demand and supply problems let alone war problems, it just looks like the
economy is just on much less certain footing than it was two quarters ago. So,
we’re going to have a re-evaluation of how much risk one wants to take in the
markets and which equities they want to hold. Markets hate uncertainty, and
we’ve got uncertainty galore.”
Peter Eliades, Editor and Publisher,
StockMarketCycles.com: “As we noted on September 28, we got our Sign of the
Bear, which is a relatively rare indicator–only 7 times in the last 73 years.
It’s not a short-term signal. It’s really a much longer-term signal, and the
fact that the signal was secured at the end of September does not speak well for
the markets outlook in terms of the intermediate to long-term. Many times, the
Sign of the Bear has marked very long periods of drought in the stock market,
where the market may really under-perform for several years or as long as five
or ten years. I don’t know that’s going to be the case this time around, but I
think the picture and the outlook for the market have darkened
considerably.”
Tony Cecin, Director of Equity Trading,
U.S. Bancorp/Piper Jaffray: “Trading is nervous, obviously, based on
whatever the latest sound bite from the Middle East is, but overall, I don’t
think the market is acting too badly considering some of the videos we have been
looking at. The Dow is getting crushed pretty good today, and I bet 50 to 75
points are from Home Depot
(
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PowerRating). Also, J.P. Morgan
(
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PowerRating) is accounting
for a big part of the Dow’s decline.”