The Market Today

Today was another teeny rally. The S&P 500 gained 0.22%, which is about eleven times what it did on Friday. I still don’t feel much richer, but our Buy List was up 0.20%. Except for Frontier Airlines (FRNT), the Buy List had a pretty decent day. The little airliner dropped $0.34 a share, or 3.53%.
Way back when, the original reason why Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) wanted to buy Guidant (GDT) was to get its foot in the lucrative defibrillator market. But now that Guidant has been knocked down, two of our Buy List stocks, St. Jude Medical (STJ) and Medtronic (MDT), are gobbling up its market share. Stephen D. Simpson at the Motley Fool has some interesting comparisons:

(Guidant’s) sales dropped 14% in the quarter, led by a 26% drop in defibrillator sales to $331 million. By way of comparison, St. Jude recently posted sales of $277 million, with growth of 68%. Medtronic is a more difficult comparison because it reports an out-of-sync quarter, but sales of ICD products for the last reported quarter were up 30% to about $718 million.

Those are two excellent stocks.
Here’s something not a lot of folks are talking about: The Dow Jones Transportation Average (^DJT) closed at an all-time high today at 3,979.44. Not bad, especially when you consider that the Industrials are still about 1,000 points off their high. The DJT index includes Expeditors (yay!) and Southwest Airlines (boo!). The index has shot up only in the past two weeks. Also, the Dow Jones Energy Index (^DJUSEN) got hit again today. It finished down -1.62%. The government reported that gas prices fell for the fifth straight week.

Posted by on November 7th, 2005 at 5:40 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.