每日市場點評 --- March 18, 2008

Bulls are going to celebrate tonight. Why shouldn’t they? Just one day following one of the most volatile trading sessions in years, the market had one of its best days in history. In fact, S&P500 had the best percentage gain since Oct 2002 and the Dow gained 420 points, the fourth best in its 112 years’ history. Even more incredible, this all happened on a day filled with so-so economic news and a Fed decision that arguably disappointed some on the Street.

The market started the day in a positive tone following better-than-expected earning reports from Goldman and Lehman. Although both earnings were much weaker compared to the same period last year, the bar on the Street was set so low that both handily beat expectation by a wide margin. After being rumoured about liquidity issue recently, Lehman had its best day in its history and in fact, its stock price gained more than 100% from its low yesterday. All financial stocks were on fire. Many stocks in this group gained more than 10% for the day and the index itself gained more than 8%, which is the largest gain since March 2000.

But the rally was far broader than just financials. The least gainer among the 10 major sectors was utilities, which still posted a respective gain of 1.8%. Treasuries were sold off sharply following the Fed’s decision as yields jumped higher throughout the yield curve. The US dollar also got a boost from today’s interest rate decision while gold plunged more than 20 dollars per ounce. The CRB commodity rebounded more than 1% following yesterday’s 20-point drop. The market internals were also quite positive. The advance volumes outpaced decline volumes by more than 9-to-1 on both NYSE and Nasdaq. One final note: At today’s closing price, the Dow is above its 50-day ma for the first time in 2008, which is quite positive from technical perspective.