Overheard On The Street
Here’s what they’re saying at mid-day:
Joe Battipaglia, Chief Investment
Strategist, Gruntal & Co.:”We’re seeing more improvement in stock prices, and I think that’s coming about by a more reassured investor looking not
so much at the next couple of quarters of earnings but actually out to next
year’s earnings potential. Keying off of corporate announcements regarding the
outlook as not being as bearish as it had been coupled with the fact that the
Federal Reserve clearly is most concerned with the economy’s well being puts us
in a very good position from a market perspective. Since the Nasdaq was so
grossly oversold and the S&P was down by 28%, those kinds of corrections are
commensurate with a slowdown in the economy and suggest to me that we’ve had a
bottom and it’s behind us now.”
Barry Berman, Managing Director of Equity
Trading, Robert W. Baird: “I think the market right now is getting through
the period of first quarter earnings and is starting to look forward to the Fed
meeting, so I think we are getting into a period of time where the market is
going to have a little more opportunity to move higher because the bad news on
the quarter is behind you. It’s going to be a while before you have second
quarter pre-announcements, and you also have a Fed meeting coming up which I
think people will also be hopeful for, so I think that hopefully the worst is
behind us.”