Friday, May 13, 2011

Dow has another triple digit loss

Stocks had a bad day, capping a bad month. This reminds me of last May, but it's only half over & Greek debt concerns are haunting the markets. Dow dropped 100, decliners over advancers 5-2 & NAZ fell a bigger 34. Financials led the way down as the Financial Index dropped to near its lowest level this year!

S&P 500 FINANCIALS INDEX

Value	212.12
Change	-3.13 (-1.5%)

MLPs are still struggling as they've been doing for 2 weeks. The chart below shows May has been dreary. The Alerian MLP Index is slightly negative YTD. investors continue to worry about changes to tax presferred distributions. The REIT index fell 2 to 243 & junk bond funds were mixed. Treasuries were higher, the yield on the 10 year Treasury bond fell 4 basis points to 3.19%. Oil gained strength & is in the $99s while gold lost 15 to $1490.

ALERIAN MLP INDEX

Value	360.82
Change	-1.36 (-0.4%)

Treasury Yields:

U.S. 3-month		0.02%
U.S. 2-year		0.54%
U.S. 10-year		3.19%

All markets are having a time of it. Even safe haven investments like gold & Treasury are not getting the kind of buying that is expected under the circumstances. The decline by MLPs is most troubling if that is considered a leading indicator for the markets. They had been outpacing the overall market for most of the rally. Now they may be leading stocks lower.

An extra mention. I posted yesterday, but Blogger (from Google), which hosts my blog (and many others), was out for almost 24 hours. While it was out, Thurs postings were lost. That's the first time I've gone thru such an experience in over 3 years. Writing this post was difficult, simple copy/paste operations were not going well. As I wrote, the efficiency of the Blogger host improved. Hopefully next week it will be back to the way it was, allowing me to be more productive. To all, have a good weekend.