Stocks Up on Jobless Claims

It doesn’t seem like Thursday. Such are the joys of holiday shortened weeks. The stock market is doing well so far this morning.
As I mentioned before, we seem to be stuck in a trading range. The S&P 500 has bobbed between 1020 and 1130 for over three months. Thanks to the last few days, plus today, we may soon challenge the upper end of that range. Let’s hope we do because nearly everything the market gained in July was taken away by August. I don’t want September to be another July (doesn’t that sound like the title of an old song?).
We can never know exactly why the market is up on a certain day, but the good news this morning is that there was a drop in jobless claims. First-time claims fell to 451,000 last week from a revised 478,000 a week earlier. The Street had been expecting claims to fall to 470,000.
Frankly, I don’t put a great deal of faith in jobless claims. This number comes out every Thursday and it contains a lot of what stats folks call “noise.” On top of that, nine states didn’t give numbers this week due to the Labor Day holiday. I think this is simply a case of the market wanting to rally and if that’s the excuse, so be it.
I see that all of our Buy List stocks are rallying (except NICK and MOG-A haven’t traded yet). AFLAC (AFL) has been as high as $51.27 and it’s close to making a four-month high.

Posted by on September 9th, 2010 at 9:49 am


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