Tim Heekin Quotations

Whether this is sustainable remains to be seen.

We're flirting with key technical support levels. Markets rally but then can't sustain. There's continued nervousness about accounting and corporate profits, but no catalyst to move us out of it.

We have no economic numbers Monday and my sense is that the market is going to keep consolidating for the next few sessions, before we make a bottom and then build from there

Semiconductors and software have been the leadership for the past few months, so when there's tech selling now, they tend to lose support first. But we're at the top of a range, technically, so we're going to see some selling for the next two or three sessions.

Right now, it's going to be a push and pull,

People will be looking for hints about the direction of the earnings throughout the week, ... both in terms of individual stocks and sectors.

Pharmaceuticals and energy and financials are doing well. For sure, that's helping the overall Dow.

If they feel like the consumer is losing his strength and his spending power in the market, and he's going to be putting more money into savings, that's going to make the market nervous.

I don't think we're going to be able to see anything much until we at least get past Labor Day,

GM is such a bellwether, major company in the United States, and if they filed for bankruptcy, that just wouldn't be a good indication as to market conditions.

I think the market has gotten tired ... and poor attendance is also contributing to a very quiet market today. I think this is short-term, but I think the path of least resistance is down.

I think we probably need to take it even lower before the correction that we've been seeing is done.

I think the rally just ran out of gas. You're right at the beginning of the earnings reporting, and all the good news is priced in, and buyers are getting a little tired. I think it's time for a little pullback. After we see a little consolidation, then we can go higher again.

I think even if oil prices continue to fall for the next few days, we're probably going to see stocks continuing to pull back.

People are looking for more clarity in terms of Iraq, interest rates, oil prices and the dollar.

Retailers are still taking a hit off of Best Buy's loss yesterday and now today's data is providing some more selling pressure in the sector.

I think people are trying to drive the market higher. They're coming in on what have been some of the better groups, that being retail and technology still.

I think people walked in confused today as to whether we are going to continue this uptrend through year-end or back off.

I think this is a continuation of what we've been seeing for the last six or seven weeks, with the exception of last week,

You'll see a moderate move off of Greenspan's comments tomorrow. But at this point, it's pretty well anticipated by the market.

You'll see a moderate move off of Greenspan's comments tomorrow, ... But at this point, it's pretty well anticipated by the market.

The question is whether this is a one-day thing after all the selling or if it's something more sustainable.

There are good trends everywhere. Some people are looking for a 5 percent to 10 percent correction, partly because they think it's healthy and partly because they want a pullback so they can jump back in. But the path of least resistance remains up.

Financials are picking up across the board, that bodes well for the market, ... Being such a big percentage of the indices, if people are getting behind financials late in the third and fourth quarter, that will carry the market positive in 2005.

We've been on a tear and it's just kind of flattening out today after hitting some near-term highs yesterday.

This week is pretty light on the economic news. The first-quarter earnings should be good and should provide some sort of cushion for the markets.

You can interpret it a bunch of ways, but all I know, and all that the market seems to know, is that short-term rates are going to rise, and they're going to rise really soon.

You had this huge down move on Tuesday, you gained half of it back yesterday, and more of it today,

What started this two weeks ago was the big pension funds and other institutions coming in, seeing that bonds were getting over-valued and shifting money out of fixed income and into equities.

Bonds finally showed a little reversal. We put in a high on the long-terms and then dipped off of that. I think the big bond funds came in and started taking profits after the recent run. The real test will be if we can hold these levels.

Earnings have been fine, but they just haven't been as robust as people were hoping. The guidance for the third and fourth quarters hasn't been that strong, and part of the rally was based on people betting that the second half of the year would be good, so with the numbers not saying that, you're seeing some selling.

FedEx is a big drag today, Merck is down, steel is down, airlines are down, it's all weighing on the transports,

There's a good tone to the market. We're moving towards some key technical levels, particularly with the S&P 500. I think that if we can hold and then break through them, we could go higher.

There's going to be no true market direction until the earnings picture and military actions become clearer.

There's no economic news out Friday or Monday, and the economic news the rest of next week is not hugely influential,

There's nothing fundamental driving these gains. The Nasdaq had sold off over 10 percent, the Dow and the S&P had started to correct as well, so you're seeing a bounce off of that.

The tech sector as a whole has performed so badly this year; the Nasdaq has been the worst performer year-to-date. I think a lot of money flew into the 10-year bond during the conventions, during the Olympics, and now people are looking to put their money into the beaten-down sectors, like tech.

Action is being driven by the news of the day, namely Microsoft, Nortel, Qwest, ... The fact that we're hanging in there with so much negative news out there is good.

You've had a strong move in the market in the last two months and this to me looks like healthy consolidation.

This is the fourth day in a row where there's been disappointing economic news, and the market is reacting to that. People are also doing a little consolidating before the weekend.

This is purely a technical rally. There is no economic news, no company or sector-specific news that's causing this,

A lot of people are taking the week off and there's not much news, so that creates this volatility.

A lot of people are surprised that the markets are behaving as well as they are. But there's a sense that even the negative numbers don't matter as much as they might have, that markets are preceding the turn of the economy.

A lot of growth equities are in favor right now.

They had an opportunity to get tech really rocking if they said something positive, but instead, they guided lower.

This movement in the bond market is amazing, truly unprecedented. People are starting to sell fixed-income and put that money into stocks. Equity is starting to look like this undervalued dark horse worth betting on.

There's a lot of focus on the language,

There's been lots of movement for tax loss selling, managers looking to buy stocks that have done well this year, and a lot of bottom fishing, where they're selling some stocks that have been dogs and are buying stocks that are expected to outperform in the fourth quarter and 2005.

There's a panicky feeling that the telecom weakness could spread across tech in general,

It's just drifting up today, there's no one catalyst,

It's a quiet day before Easter, and we're waiting for the bunny. You have people not wanting to make moves before a three day weekend, and you have some fears about terrorism -- with Rice speaking, and because this is a religious holiday.

It's the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, there's no one here, desks are half-staffed. There are going to be even less people around Friday.

It's the last week of August, people are on vacation and a lot of the big institutions in New York are half-staffed.

It's been a steady, slow grind down, the same thing we've been seeing for weeks, ... You have the financials getting hit hard on the Enron stories and concerns about debt. Citigroup is heavily weighted and it's having an impact on the rest of the sector.

It's been pretty quiet all week, volumes have come down...You have pretty significantly reduced volume here in August, ... This morning there was nothing to really move the dial on PPI or jobless claims.

It's pretty quiet today. We've got an FOMC meeting behind us, most of the earnings behind us, an employment number behind us. The next piece of economic news everyone will look at will be retail sales on Thursday.

It's pretty quiet today, ... We've got an FOMC meeting behind us, most of the earnings behind us, an employment number behind us. The next piece of economic news everyone will look at will be retail sales on Thursday.

The news created volume on positive speculation about other potential corporate mergers. However, last week was a down week, so we have a little bit of a bounce-back rally Monday.

Even with the Dell news, the two themes we've seen today, and lately, have been strength in select technology -- today, that was the chip sector -- and strength in industrials.

After that period, you could see a rally in July, with people really setting themselves up then for the second half of the year.

I hope we'll see a nice pick-up in business as September gets underway.

I guess a new deadline could be positive for markets, but I'm of the camp that the more the war is postponed, the more it keeps the market distracted.

If the rate increases do stall out at 5 percent, I think there's still tremendous upside room for this group of stocks. Rates will be a very key metric that's going to determine whether these stocks make new highs or pull-back.

In the first four months of the year, people made a lot of moves, but since then, I think people have been sitting on their hands a bit. I think that will continue in the next week, but a few weeks from now, it gets more interesting.

Clearly, the Fed is the biggest drive in the market right now.

Citigroup was disappointing and financials are the worst performing group today, ... You pair that with weakness in technology and energy -- the two leaders for the market over the last eight weeks -- and you have sort of a ho-hum day.

I didn't see anything fundamental to turn us around. I think it's a combination of program buying and asset reallocation,

If companies are not giving optimistic guidance, that's causing some ripples and some concerns in the market.

The election will take center stage next week, but hopefully that will actually end on Tuesday. Then later in the week, people can focus on the jobs report and the earnings.

You've got oil prices and the economic news having an impact today. Obviously tomorrow it's all about unemployment. That's the wild card.

You've got a lot of factors here all coming into play. Oil is having a negative impact and the pre-announcement news from Viacom was significant. You also had all the banks reporting strong earnings yesterday, but yet they're selling them off two days in a row, and we're near the end of the quarter and you've got portfolio managers wanting to cash out of the rally's recent leaders.

You've got a lot of factors here all coming into play, ... Oil is having a negative impact and the pre-announcement news from Viacom was significant. You also had all the banks reporting strong earnings yesterday, but yet they're selling them off two days in a row, and we're near the end of the quarter and you've got portfolio managers wanting to cash out of the rally's recent leaders.

The duration of the up move has been pretty significant. The buyers are just taking a little bit of a pause.

All of the numbers this week are potentially market moving. I think people will be watching the numbers for hints about inflation.

All the big news is out of the way, the Fed, the elections, all the big companies have reported. So we've got nothing new except this piece of bad news from Cisco.

The market is very resilient. We're shaking off any kind of bad news.

The market is usually ahead of a recovery, and in the past, the market was reacting to negative data. It seems to be shaking off bad news now. To me, that's good news.

The market's had a pretty good run this week, in terms of volume and gains, and I think coming in this morning, there was the potential to build on that rally if the jobs report was a blowout.

The market has been trying to hit these highs for some time, but we've been nearing them with less and less enthusiasm,

The market has been down, triggered by some comments from Fed governors on inflation,

The leadership of the market is the same as it has been for six to nine months, and that's been energy and technology.

The main drivers today are that oil prices and bond prices are up, and that's not good for equities.

The lead up to the Fed meeting was that we are going to be done soon, they are going to put the brakes on, and that fueled the momentum. But now people are realizing that they aren't done yet, and that's shifted the psychology.