Friday, June 6, 2008

Stocks tumble on oil gusher

Oil prices shot up above 139, before pulling back a few cents to close at 138.87 up 11.08 (18 in 2 days). This was plenty, causing the markets to have a mild crash. Dow tumbled 394, decliners ahead of advancers 4½ to 1 & NAZ down 75. Wheww!!! All this activity on just 1.2B shares. That low level of volume is not the climactic sell-off bulls bulls would like to see signaling the end of selling. Oil is living in it's own world as speculators have taken charge, but the analyst forecast about reaching 150 by July 4 lit a fire under speculators in the last 2 days. In this sell-off, even Chevron (CVX) & Exxon Mobil (XOM) fell. Banks were punished badly, check BAC & USB in the right column. However, the Alerian MLP index help up pretty well, falling less than 1 to 293½, near the low end of a trading range where it has lived for much of the year. Boring pipelines with high yields looked attractive!

Not much to say. The weekend will be good time to check prices & valuations, preparing for buying opportunities at lower levels.

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