The Week in Review: 7/8/07 to 7/14/07
After taking the past few days off I wanted to catch up and post my usual The Week In Review as well as look forward to The Week Ahead. A lot has happened since I last wrote so pardon me if I skip over some things and give you a very brief summary this week…
There wasn’t anything scary about Friday the 13th this past week unless you are a Bear in the market. The Dow broke its previous all-time high and even flirted with 14,000 this past week. During Friday’s trading the DJIA index rose to within 70 points of this next milestone only to pull back slightly and settle at 13,907 (a 2% gain on the week!)… other indices were moving significantly higher as well. The S&P 500 was up 1.4% to 1,552.50. The NASDAQ was up 1.5% in line with the S&P 500, ending the week at 2,707.
The week ended on an excellent note for the indices but early in the week appeared to be singing a different tune. On Tuesday, Home Depot and Sears reported lower than expected earnings. Home Depot blamed the sluggish housing market for the decline. I don’t entirely buy into Home Depot’s reasoning. I expect Lowes (NYSE: LOW) to post better numbers than the Home Depot did. Lowes reports its second quarter earnings on Monday, August 20th. Although I wouldn’t expect Lowes to completely sail past the analysts’ estimates of $0.61 per share quarterly earnings, I do think it will meet or slightly exceed them.
Considering the negative news coming from Home Depot earlier in the week, the market was much more upbeat Friday when General Electric posted better than expected quarterly earnings sending the stock to a five year high above $40 per share. The GE quarterly earnings even over-shadowed the 0.9% drop in retail sales that the US Department of Commerce reported on Friday for the month of June. This nearly 1% drop followed the May increase of 1.5%. I think the GE results were more of a surprise to investors than the slight drop in retail sales, so although these sound like conflicting results being reported, the GE results are for an entire quarter - not just the month of June like the Department of Commerce’s report, and furthermore the GE reported results were much more unexpected than a very slight decrease in the retail sales for the month of June.
Here’s looking to The Week Ahead!!!
As always, I appreciate your comments and feedback…