Stocks Go On A Wild Ride!

As the new year begins to unfold, volatility has taken command! Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (chart) had a 424 point intraday swing, an intraday move not seen in quite sometime. Volatility continued to surge this morning as stocks opened down sharply by weaker than expected retail sales for the month of December, and JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM) announcing weaker than expected quarterly results. So is this the new norm? Investors and especially traders have been waiting a long time to see volatility come back into the market and they may have just gotten what they have been expecting. For years, stocks have been in a low vol environment thanks in part to the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policies. Now that those policies have and are winding down, it’s no surprise to me that volatility has picked up. Furthermore, now that we are have entered into Q4 earnings reporting season, I expect that volatility will remain elevated and possibly increase.

Companies that are scheduled to report their earnings results are over the next week are; Citigroup (NYSE: C), Intel (NasdaqGS: INTC), Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), Delta Airlines (NYSE: DAL), International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM), Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), Netflix (NasdaqGS: NFLX), American Express (NYSE: AXP), eBay Inc. (NasdaqGS: EBAY), Starbucks (NasdaqGS: SBUX), Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ), General Electric (NYSE: GE), Honeywell International ( NYSE: HON) and McDonald’s Corp (NYSE: MCD) just to name a few.

More now than ever I will be focusing on “top-line” growth of corporate America to see if this most recent sell-off poses a buying opportunity. If the top-line of companies do not begin to grow in a meaningful way, I would expect the selling pressure to continue. Good luck to all 🙂

~George