Market Wrap – IBM gets Analytical with SPSS
By Robert Perrego, at 4:44 pm on July 28th, 2009Years ago IBM morphed from being a hardware company into a company with tens of billions of dollars of contracts for computer services billed out for decades. Lenovo now owns their laptop division, they have not made desktops in a long time and it seems the large scale directional moves IBM makes are always one step ahead of their competitors. Hewlett Packard bought Electronic Data Systems last year in order to get into the information technology and computer services sector playing catch up with IBM after seeing how the contractual revenue streams from this type of business would smooth out earnings cycles. Basically HP was playing catch up with IBM and now IBM is drilling down into IT buying SPSS Inc. (NSDQ: SPSS) which provides analytics software and solutions and is in the growing field of business intelligence. Starting to sound like some cloak and dagger stuff right? Get Smart?
Dare I say it? Today we saw more evidence of the ‘green shoots’ that were so in vogue recently but seemed to disappear from the tips of tongues of most politicians when the market took its recent down leg. Fortunately the market has been running up as of late and so I guess we are allowed to discuss the ‘green shoots’ again. Today, for the first time in three years, the housing market saw prices rise month over month! While the year over year average price of housing still declined, it declined at a slower rate and rose 0.5% since the previous month. I guess that 0.5% didn’t make all you homeowners out there feel rich as Consumer Confidence dropped from 49.3 to 46.6.
San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen, speaking in Idaho today, cited seeing the ‘first solid signs’ the economy is emerging from the recession and all day long talking heads on TV were putting the two words ‘housing’ and ‘bottom’ together in the same sentence.
Putting ‘housing’ and ‘bottom’ together should be a pretty powerful force these days but even though the talking heads chirped that all day long we had a split market; The Dow finished down 11.79 points after being down as much as 90 points during the day. President Yellen’s comments may have had something to do with a late day recovery.
Dow Jones -11.79 (-0.12%, 9096.72) S&P 500 -2.56 points (-0.26%, 979.62) Nasdaq 100 +6.16 points (+0.38%, 1605.47).
Gold got hit straight out of the gate down $16.60 an ounce to $936.70 at 4:19 p.m. est. The dollar strengthened today and hearings about commodities trading took their toll on oil as well. It seems our all knowing politicians in Washington D.C. have now decided to take on regulating just how much money for how much risk people in the market should be paid. As we all know our elected officials are the best of the best when it comes to finding a culprit to persecute before the altar of the public vote getting machine and today they decided to go with that old reliable bulls-eye they have had painted on Goldman Sachs back ever since Goldman paid the TARP funds off, flipped them the bird and told us all they were going back to business as usual of making their employees rich. I don’t know if Goldman is crooked or just that good but they weathered the last storm well just in time for this one. Oil closed down $1.15/barrel (-1.68%, $67.27).
The leading sector to the upside was consumer non-cyclicals (usually a defensive sector) at +0.72% and tech was up 0.25%. energy was down 1.69% on the falling oil price and finance was the second biggest loser (not a fat loss show) dropping 0.98%.
Speaking of fat people, the Los Angeles Times ran an article about taxing fat peoples’ food as it just came to light the latest culprit reason socialized health care is so expensive (it couldn’t be that government is just ridiculously efficient could it?) is that fat people cost us a lot more money to take care of, especially once they become diabetics. Now it used to be that taxing food was a complete political no-no as this was a regressive tax which hits poor people the hardest. Well the way this is going I wouldn’t want to be poor AND fat because it seems if you give anyone in D.C. these days a reason to tax you, it happens. So remember, if you want to be fat – don’t forget to be rich too. Last time we saw a tax levied ‘for our own good’ it was driving the cost of cigarettes through the roof. Next target – soda – if you can believe it. I think tomorrow we move on to chocolate and jelly beans and after that the Easter Bunny gets his drivers license revoked.
