Donald Selkin Stocks Quotations

The number today struck me as neutral. More stocks are up than down, and that's the ultimate test.

Some of the stocks that rallied in advance of a possible Bush victory might be vulnerable.

Prudential upgraded the semiconductors and that got the sector going. This was the revenge of the nerds. The most beat up, pathetic stocks had one of their up days.

Today is very news driven. You've got GE, you've got HPQ, and the economic reports were a little better. It's the tech stocks that are leading the way. You're seeing a rotation out of the consumer stocks and into the techs.

The stocks that are benefiting most from better earnings are the small and mid-cap ones.

If it comes in too weak, you get worries about the economy. If you get a blowout number, everyone will get obsessed about interest rates again, the bond market will go into a tizzy, and stocks will slide.

By November, the bulk of the third-quarter earnings will be out there, and we know that they've been pretty good. But for stocks to go higher, we're going to need another catalyst. Expectations for a strong fourth quarter could do it, positive comments on the holiday season could do it, but really, I think it's going to be the economic news.

Maybe Exxon will go up a little bit today because they beat the earnings; but remember, the stock has dropped 7 points in the last couple of weeks. So I would say this is really not a very dynamic investment. People like it and get a little dividend. You are really wasting your time with these stocks because you invest money in them and in two years, you have the same price as you had from the time you invested. So you really, in a sense, lose money by owning these stocks.

Cyclical stocks should really not do well if the economy is going to slow, and you can see, look at the cyclical components of the Dow, a stock like International Paper, Du Pont, all at multi-year lows. I really don't see much there, I would avoid them.

There's a lot of earnings for next week, but I don't see what's going to give us a lift. If the earnings have been good so far, and stocks have fallen anyway, what could the next wave of earnings do for us, even if they are positive?

It's a special situation. Individual stocks that are heavily weighted are doing well.

Individual stocks can go up, but the market is too overbought internally and there is too much complacency for a rally.

The earnings have been tremendous. We are going to see a shift back to 'new economy' stocks because they are less rate sensitive.

Gold is at a high and the dollar weakened again. As a result, you would think stocks would be a lot lower today, with people putting money into those areas and taking money out of stocks, but they're not that bad. We're kind of just drifting. The Dow has its own company-specific problems, but the Nasdaq is hanging in there.

I don't think it's going to have much impact on stocks either way -- they basically matched the earnings, but the sales were a little light, so it's kind of neutral.

What's interesting is it's rare to break new highs in an industry that's pretty much bombed this year. Many stocks go sideways. This one is moving up.

Where's the motivation to drive stocks higher?. I thought that we could have done better, but there was no real motivation to move things higher or lower.