Paul Shread

The U.S. dollar has stopped falling, oil is going down and financial stocks are outperforming, yet the stock market continues to fall, as the focus has shifted from the credit crunch to inflation and recession overnight. In short, the bulls just can’t catch a break here. The major indexes (see charts below) were less than […]

About the only bright spot to come out of the last couple of days is that the Federal Reserve doesn’t look nearly as out of touch as investors thought on Tuesday, after the Fed cut interest rates by a measly quarter point. But the bad news is that the Fed may be running out of […]

Stocks plunged Friday on news that consumer inflation jumped in November. The CPI — up 0.8% on the headline number and 0.3% with food and energy costs stripped out — followed Thursday’s news that wholesale inflation had its biggest gain in 34 years. Together, the two reports suggest that the Federal Reserve might not have […]

Just a day after getting chastised by investors for not doing more to end the credit market crisis, the Federal Reserve tried again on Wednesday — and once again ran into skepticism. After falling more than 2% Tuesday on a rate cut and policy statement that investors felt didn’t go far enough, major stock indexes […]

The Federal Reserve is facing a historic test here — and appears to realize it. Only twice in the Fed’s 94-year history have financial markets failed to respond to two or more Fed rate cuts — 1929-1932 and 2001-2002, putting both the Fed and the market at a critical juncture here (see Traders Sell The […]

Our caution of a week ago appears to have been warranted, as the S&P 500 gave up about four different support levels today. To the upside, 1484-1500 is once again resistance, while 1460 is important support. With the Fed taking its time — Mr. Bernanke seems to think he’s not doing his job if the […]

nCipher has acquired the assets of NeoScale Systems after the storage security vendor wound down operations. nCipher, a key management specialist, paid $1.95 million for most of the intellectual property and assets of NeoScale. NCipher picked up NeoScale’s CryptoStor tape encryption product and KeyVault key management technology, but did not acquire the company’s disk encryption […]

It’s been a tough year for the chip sector, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index off 8% despite a 12% gain in the Nasdaq, but Texas Instruments offered the sector a little hope late Monday when it raised its financial guidance for the current quarter. TI said it expects fourth-quarter sales of $3.5-$3.66 billion, at the […]

EMC has been lagging competitors such as IBM and Hitachi in block-based storage virtualization, but the company hopes to change that with Invista 2.0. EMC’s SAN virtualization product combines application software and hardware with intelligent switches from Brocade and Cisco to provide “non-disruptive data mobility,” said Rob Emsley, EMC senior director of software product marketing. […]

Stocks were little changed Friday after the government’s monthly jobs report came in stronger than expected, but not so strong that the Federal Reserve won’t have room to cut interest rates when it meets next week. The Labor Department reported that the economy added 94,000 jobs last month, in line with estimates of a 70,000-100,000 […]

Stocks posted strong gains for a second day Thursday after President Bush announced an agreement with mortgage firms to freeze interest rates for five years, an effort aimed at helping subprime borrowers facing steep increases in adjustable rate mortgages. That was good news for mortgage lenders like Countrywide Financial and other financial stocks like E*Trade […]

Stocks are building nicely on last week’s apparent bottom, with blue chip stocks looking particularly strong (see S&P and Dow charts below). That said, breadth hasn’t been all that strong on this move, with the NYSE advance-decline line lagging and the Nasdaq A-D line doing even worse (charts three and four below). Unless the rally […]