Alfred Kugel Quotations

You don't bet the farm but you need to be putting some money in as you find stocks that look attractive.

Generally the market will tend to go in the opposite direction of oil prices and sometimes oil shares, but that didn't happen today yet.

People were worried the financial companies wouldn't have a strong earnings trend because of the flat yield curve, but now it's been flat for a while, and the earnings are still coming through.

We've now changed the valuation of the stock market quite a bit, ... If anything, the earnings estimates have been going up and stocks have been going down. The price-to-earnings ratio on forward earnings is now down to about 15 times, which is very low relative to interest rates and inflation at the present time.

Unemployment claims were OK. I suspect we're still in for low volatility sliding up to the close tomorrow. I don't expect any big moves in either direction. That's disappointing, given that the week between Christmas and New Year's is what we call the Santa Claus rally, and so far all we've gotten is a lump of coal.

I would guess this will be another weak report and that, I think, will keep the Fed on its path of easing, ... In a perverse way, the market will like it because they'll think the Fed will make another cut at the next FOMC meeting.

Some of the things that worried people, that the economy was slowing too much, that inflation was rising too much, have been assuaged here by the numbers we got this morning.

You really have a two-tier market with tech stocks going down and everything else going up. Part of this is because valuations in technology stocks got overdone this year and, at the same time, the Dow hadn't performed and now they look cheap.

Now it looks like the Fed might raise rates at the January meeting, and that might be it.

I'm afraid we're not out the woods yet with our friends at the Fed.