每日市場點評 --- June 19, 2008

The market had a modest rebound this Thursday. The Nasdaq, led by some big tech names, advanced more than 1.3% while in comparison, both the Dow and the S&P 500 were up around 0.3%. The news on the economic front was mixed this morning. Initial claims for the week ending June 14th came at 381K, a decreased of 5K from the previous week’s revised figure of 386K. It was higher than economists had called for but still stayed within the range of estimation. The continuing claims, on the other hand, dropped 76K to 3.06 million in the latest week. In a separate report, the Philadelphia Fed’s survey for June dropped to -17.1 from -15.6 in May. Economists were expecting an improvement to -10.0. Lastly, the leading index increased slightly in May. Positive developments in interest rate spread and stock prices offset areas such as declining real money supply and building permits. It should be noted that the coincident index also increased slightly in May, which marked the first increase in 7 months.

Transportations and technologies were among the biggest winners in today’s session. The former was aided by an almost $5 drop in crude price, which was triggered by China announcing plans to raise fuel costs in an attempt to restrain economy. Not surprisingly, energies were the only major sector that ended the session in negative territory. Financials, after being hammered earlier by news that Citigroup is going to make more write-downs, reversed its course and ended the session higher. Strengths in the financial sector helped to move the broad market higher in the afternoon. The CRB commodity index ended the session lower by 1.7%. The US dollar was mixed against the major currencies while treasuries were sold off after gaining in each of the previous three sessions. The market breath was neutral to positive and the volume was on the heavy side.