Markets decline on concerns over Greek debt woes

Dow fell 36, decliners ahead of advancers 3-2 & NAZ retreated 8 from yesterday's record close.  The MLP index dropped 5+ to the 434s & the REIT index a fraction to the 321s.  Junk bond funds sold off & Treasuries rose as stocks declined.  Oil climbed higher with buying in the PM & gold was also up modestly.

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....Crude Oil Jul 15

....57.21

...0.30

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What Google just announced at its IO conference is a bombshell for the future of the company.  For years the search giant has witnessed the chipping away of its core product, search, due to the rise of mobile applications & their siloed-off experiences.  Users are engaging more & more with programs that have no attachment or often need for search on the broad web, & as a result its position as the owner of user habits, interests, & needs on the internet has looked increasingly at risk.  Today the company demoed a new feature of its Android OS which allows its Now service (a dashboard of notifications focused on your life & interests) to plug in as a layer that essentially hovers above any app running on a phone or tablet.  Activated by the home button, it's always there.  This means that a user can get contextual search information around almost anything you're doing, provided there is text & data that can be pulled from the app itself.  And the best part is that developers won't have to make any changes to their existing software to allow the new service, dubbed Now on Tap, to bring search & context into the user's view.  This is a major move for 2 reasons.  The first is that it really brings GOOG back to a place of dominance as the glue that holds digital life together.  But secondly, it starts to show how GOOG can be an interconnecting layer between the apps themselves, a kind of neutral staging ground between one action & another.  This is a sea-change for how to use mobile devices & how mobile apps interact with one another.  Currently, OS-defined tools which let apps interact with each other (with rules defined by the OS-makers, not developers).  However Now on Tap is aware enough of the core functions of those apps that it can predict what you'd most likely want to do with them, & then execute on those needs.  That's the ultimate promise of Now on Tap, & it's a game changing one.  The service is as impressive, there's a whole new world ahead of us for devices.  One that's more connected than ever.  The stock lost a penny.  If you would like to learn  more about GOOG, click on this link:
club.ino.com/trend/analysis/stock/GOOG?a_aid=CD3289&a_bid=6ae5b6f7

What Google Just Announced Is a Bombshel

Google (GOOG)

JPMorgan Chase, a Dow stock, will cut thousands of jobs over the next year as it seeks to contain expenses & sells businesses, said a leaker.  The lender has been consolidating back-office support, cutting mortgage workers as home-loan volumes decline & reducing the ranks of tellers as more customers use automated channels.  The bank may cut more than 5K workers by next year.  JPM, which had 241K employees as of Mar 31, said in Feb it would pare $4.8B of expenses from its consumer- & investment-banking divisions.  Banks have made cost cuts a priority as revenue stagnates in a prolonged era of low interest rates that has suppressed interest income.  JPM has eliminated about 6K jobs in the 12 months ended Mar 31.  The number of total employees may hold steady over the next year if business conditions allow hiring in areas including wealth management.  The stock was down 27¢.  If you would like to learn  more about JPM, click on this link:

club.ino.com/trend/analysis/stock/JPM?a_aid=CD3289&a_bid=6ae5b6f7

JPMorgan Will Cut Thousands of Jobs as Bank Pares Costs

J P Morgan Chase (JPM)

US oil production surged to a 43-year high, despite a price war that resulted in a more than 50% reduction in active US oil wells.  Oil prices saw downward pressure after the Dept of Energy (DOE) reported a draw down in crude inventories of 2.8M barrels for the latest week.  The DOE also reported that US production rose to 9.566M barrels per day, surpassing the previous peak of 9.422M set in Mar.  While no weekly data is available beyond 1983, the production number is the highest, if translated to a monthly basis, since May 1972.  Record production in the US & record production of 10.3M barrels a day from Saudi Arabia in Apr continue to confirm that global supplies are ramping up in the face of lower prices, not falling.  OPEC has adopted a market-based pricing strategy that it hoped would shake out high cost producers.  One such high cost producer is the US shale industry, which dramatically boosted world production in recent years.  While US rigs are now down more than 50% from last year, analysts have speculated that the rigs coming off line are those that were already declining in production & that the robust rigs are still operating.  In addition, many investors believed that lower prices would squeeze US shale producers to produce less, but the data show otherwise.

US oil production hits 43-year high ahead of OPEC

Tomorrow the gov is expected to revise downward its estimate of Q1 GDP from a growth rate of 0.2% to a contraction of 0.8%.  Old news, but not welcomed by investors.  The IMF says it expects a Greek exit from the euro zone, adding to nervousness about the Greek debt mess.  However stocks are absorbing these thoughts in a fairly calm fashion, so far.  Helped by a big pop on May 1, Dow is up about 300 this month.  This has been a surprisingly good month even though the news has been drab to negative.

Dow Jones Industrials