Sam Collins

Market Could See New Highs Today

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Yesterday, for the second day in a row, the broad market fell following a strong opening as investors were first cheered by good employment news, and then fretted about the employment news that was to come.

Not unexpectedly, the financials ran into some profit-taking after a couple of very strong days, and that, too, put pressure on the broad indices.

A smaller-than-expected weekly initial jobless claims of 550,000 caused a flurry of buying on the opening. But jobless claims are still at uncomfortably high levels, and "everybody is real, real nervous about the unemployment number tomorrow," said a director of U.S. equity trading at Canaccord Adams, according to the Wall Street Journal.

And that does sum it up. With rumors of adjustments to prior reports and wildly pessimistic forecasts, it is no wonder that the markets have been flat lately.

After the close on Aug. 4, Cisco Systems (CSCO) beat earnings forecasts but said that the rest of the year would be challenging. The stock was off sharply until just after 10 a.m., when buyers emerged and drove it to a gain for the day. But technology in general was weak, and that was shown in an underperformance of the Nasdaq (NASD), which lagged the other major indices.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI) was off 25 points to 9,256, the S&P 500 (SPX) fell 6 points to 997, and the Nasdaq fell 20 points to 1,973.

Volume on the NYSE totaled 1.4 billion shares with decliners ahead of advancers by 9-to-5. The Nasdaq traded 730 million shares with decliners there ahead by more than 2-to-1.