Rally Rallies On, Cit Saved, Conference Board Optimism

Stocks surged today extending last week’s aggressive rally. Good news from the Conference Board combined with entrenched commercial lender, Cit Group, obtaining funding to avoid bankruptcy powered the optimistic spirit. Goldman Sachs joined the euphoria by stating that the second half of 2009 may trigger the most aggressive stock rally in over a quarter of a century. The DJIA soared another +102.21 to 8848.15 closing on the high of the day, the tech heavy Nasdaq followed suit adding +22.68 to 1909.29 and the broad based S&P 500 gained +10.75 to 951.13.

Bank of America
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– Did not participate in the rally after falling 5.20% or 68 cents to $12.21/share since being downgraded to “in line” from “outperform” by an analyst.

Caterpillar
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– Paradoxically shares advanced 7.80% or $2.63 to $36.62/share after being upgraded to buy at Bank of America.

Hasbro
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– Advanced 4.10% or $1.04 to $26.47/share upon beating second quarter profit estimates by 13%.

Red Hat
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– Has been chosen to take replace Cit Group in the S&P 500 on July 24th sending shares higher by 8.30% or $1.72 to $22.32/share.

Oil climbed 42 cents to $64.334, Gold advanced $11.30 to $948.80 and the fear index VIX surprisingly gained 0.25% to 24.40 on worries that the rally is simply too good to be true.

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Market Snapshot

Dow

+102.21 8848.15

NASDAQ

+22.68 1909.29

S&P 500

+10.75 951.13

Economic
News

Leading Indicators (Jun): Consensus:0.5%, Prior: 1.2%

Crude Inventories (07/17): Consensus: NA, Prior: -2.81M

Initial Claims (07/18): Consensus: NA, Prior: 522K

Existing Home Sales (Jun): Consensus: 4.80M, Prior: 4.77M

Mich Sentiment-Rev (Jul): Consensus: 64.6, Prior: 64.6