Overheard On The Street
Here’s what they’re saying at mid-day:
Robin Griffiths, Chief Technical Analyst,
HSBC: “Basically, the U.S. market indices are going up. If you begin with
the Dow, it had made a very important pattern of falling highs from January all
the way down to the end of July. We’ve just broken out of that pattern of
falling highs, and the short and the long-term moving averages have made what’s
called a Golden Cross. What that says is that the Dow is going up again. It will
certainly go to its old high of 11,700 and by the year end, roughly 12,000 looks
on. Funny enough, 12,000 always was the forecast for the end of the year, until
the wretched thing broke down a few months ago. It’s redeeming itself.
The more representative S&P 500 never did break down. It’s always been on
a bull market pattern, and it’s resuming that pattern right now. The old high is
1550, and it looks as though we’ll take that out and go to 1650 by the year end.
And the last bit is the Nasdaq, which is something a bit different. The Nasdaq
doubled between October and March, and that was really Y2K money going into the
market. The correction of that bubble was over by the end of May. We’ve got a
low in May at 3000, a low in August of 3500, and that line of rising lows
probably won’t be broken. The trend is definitely upward for the American stock
market.”
Terence Gabriel, Stock Market Strategist,
IDEAglobal.com: “I think there’s a bit of concern about some of the
upcoming economic data and how it will be read by the Federal Reserve. As well,
the market continues to watch energy prices. We saw a new contract high on crude
futures, so we have these issues in the background here that may be continuing
to some profit-taking and concern.
“But we have had a nice run in the indices here over the past four or five days, and we’re continuing to make choppy progress in stocks. I still see the
indices moving higher into mid-September, but at that point I’m concerned we
might start to see some warning signs on the Producer Price Index in September,
and as well, that might ultimately feed into the Consumer Price Index in
October. So, I think that once the market gets up into mid-September, it will
likely then suffer another round of relatively severe profit-taking and
decline.”