Are We There Yet?

Yawn!
Trading is very quiet today ahead of the three-day weekend. Here are a few random thoughts in no particular order.
TickerSense points out that the time around Memorial Day has historically been quite good for the market. Since 1960, the market is up an average of 0.11% on the Friday before Memorial Day, and 0.60% for the week after. So far, we’re keeping we tradition.
Many defensive stocks have been surprisingly strong lately. This includes stocks like Anheuser-Busch (BUD), Colgate (CL), Coke (KO) and Pepsi (PEP), Disney (DIS), General Mills (GIS) and Kellogg (K).
FactSet (FDS) has also been doing well for the past few days. David Jackson, the Grand Poobah at Seeking Alpha, pointed me to this bearish research report on FDS done by some graduate students at Yale.
Francois Trahan, the chief investment strategist at Bear Stearns, found that the number of analysts covering tech stocks has increased since the top of the tech bubble.

The average number of analysts per tech stock in the S&P 500 nearly doubled to 23.53 by the end of April from 12.36 in January 1996 and was still 22% higher than the 2000-2001 average of 19.25 analysts per tech stock, according to Mr. Trahan’s report. By the first quarter of 2000 — near the height of the Internet bubble — the total stock market value of S&P 500 tech stocks peaked at well over $4 trillion. Today it is about $2 trillion.

Jay Walker comments on a recent study showing similar irrational decision-making between humans and capuchin monkeys. Those silly monkeys.
Barry Ritholtz defends his remark that Ben Bernanke is the Neville Chamberlain of central bankers. So I guess we know who inflation is. Keeping the metaphor alive, today we learned what Poland is.
Chico’s FAS (CHS) is rallying today on a good earnings report. The stock has beaten the S&P 500 for the last eight straight years. But the streak is in serious danger. The shares are down 30% YTD.
That’s it for me. Have a great weekend, everybody!

Posted by on May 26th, 2006 at 2:33 pm


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