The Market Today

We did it. The S&P 500 jumped 0.44% today to close at a four-year high. Our Buy List rose 0.56%. For November, we’re up 6.33% to the S&P 500’s 3.42%.
Let’s look at our biggest winners for the month: Quality Systems (+24.2), Expeditors (16.8%) and Fair Isaac (12.9%). The biggest dogs have been Dell (-6.4%), Donaldson (-3.6%), Medtronic (-0.7%) and Frontier Airlines (-0.1%).
Frontier had a weird day today. It opened much higher but lost ground to close just five cents higher. More good news for Frontier may be coming. Oil briefly fell below $56 a barrel today. Oil is now down about 20% from its high. I’d like to thank Congress for being a perfect contrarian indicator.
The VIX (^VIX), the volatility index, dipped below 11 today. That’s a very low reading. I’ve been paying more attention to the IPO market recently. Except for Baidu.com, some of the best IPOs this year have been stocks you wouldn’t expect:

The best performer of the year was also one of the most talked about, Chinese Web search engine Baidu.com Inc., which has gained 171 percent since its IPO. But the stock remains well below its first day gain of 353.9 percent, illustrating the risk of chasing high-profile IPOs.
Several other top performers got off to quieter starts. Rail-car maker FreightCar America Inc., electronic payment technology provider VeriFone Holdings Inc., apparel retailer Citi Trends Inc. and medical device maker China Medical Technologies., advanced no more than 12.1 percent in their market debuts but have since more than doubled in value.
“The nice thing is you did not have to buy at the IPO price to make money on those companies,” said Taulli, of DealflowSearch.com. “Even if they did go up 10 or 15 percent on the first day you would have made a nice, tidy profit, which is not easy. It wasn’t easy this year to make a nice, tidy profit.”

Lastly, I wanted to comment on gold. The gold bugs have been very excited about gold’s rise, but I’m not impressed. Over the last 22 months, the price of gold is up 13.9%, which works out to around 7.3% annualized. If a company had grown its earnings by that amount, people would be complaining.

Posted by on November 18th, 2005 at 5:13 pm


The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.