Stock Market Update -Sep 20th

Another week, another rally in the market. Never mind that for yet another week, we see over 1/2 million new unemployment claims again; we are now on month 9 with the same high unemployment numbers! Here is what I said in my Jan 11th post: "We got more bad news from the jobs report on Friday, showing an unemployment rate of 7.2%, a loss of 524,000 jobs in December, and the worst year for job losses since 1945 (2.6 million jobs lost in 2008). " That was back in January and it continues to get worse.

New Unemployment claims for this week were over the half million mark again (545,000).
Two more banks were shut down by regulators this week (list).

Commodities: Oil prices closed around $72 per barrel, Natural Gas rallied a bit to close around $3.75, and Gold closed above $1000 again. The US Dollar index continued to fall, and Bond prices were more or less unchanged.



Next week there is a Fed meeting, though no new announcements are expected. We are approaching the end on the 3rd quarter, so you can probably expect more buying on the part of the mutual fund companies to make their portfolios look good.

Market analysis: The up-trend continues, and at this rate we could see DOW 10,000 soon! We could first see a brief pullback after this recent run, but the overall trend is up.

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