Bull market hesitates

Dow rose 30, decliners ahead of advancers by 15% & NAZ was up 5. Volume was light (only 1B shares were traded on the NYSE floor) in this indecisive day. Along with the markets, banks were essentially flat. They were down until the last ½ hour when buying gave the Financial Index a tiny gain. However the sideways trading pattern in the last 3 months is still in place.


S&P 500 FINANCIALS INDEX

Value 199.62

Change 0.14

% Change 0.1%

The Alerian MLP Index was up .80, still in the 264s & within a point of its recent yearly high. The yearly high of 271 represents bad data from when Enterprises Products (EPD) took over TEPPCO last month. The Dow Jones REIT Index fell 3 (much of that in the last hour) in an unexciting day, it needs 8 points to reach the 2009 high set 2 months ago. Junk bond funds were firmer. The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond slipped 1 basis point to 3.32%.


Alerian MLP Index --- 3 months




Dow Jones REIT Index --- 3 months





Commodities also had a flat day with gold managing to eke out a tiny gain.

CLZ09.NYM

..Crude Oil Dec 09

..79.10

.. 0.20 ......(0.2%)

GCX09.CMX

..Gold Nov 09

..1,138.80

.. 0.20 ......(0.0%)

Smith Intl (SII), an oilfield services company, sold 28M shares in a secondary & it did not go well. The stock fell 3.90 to 26.86 (13%). This is not supposed to happen in a bull market.

• UPDATE - Smith Int'l raising $800 mln in equity, shares dropat Reuters(Mon 4:39pm)

Smith International --- 1 day




Smith International --- 1 year






The President is in Asia holding meetings on important problems (export-import issues, value of Chinese currency, etc.) & very little was decided. Humdrum days are part of the markets' stories. This was one of them. Dow & Nasdaq had to struggle to crawl up to record highs for 2009. Even red hot gold could only inch up. SII picked a bad day for their stock offering. Hopefully the difficulty SII had with its big offering was only a one day event & will not be repeated.

Dow Jones Industrials --- 3 months