By Keith Fitz-Gerald Investment Director Money Morning/The Money Map Report No question, President George Bush’s approval ratings have pulled an “Enron.” A recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll conducted June 12-16 showed only 29% of the public gave Bush a favorable rating. It’s the least favorable approval rating for a U.S. president since Jimmy Carter’s approval rating dropped to just 22%. While that lousy view of the job Bush is doing will help set up a more-contentious election in November, here’s a curious fact that investors will find quite rewarding: The key to better stock-market returns isn’t having a president we “love” - it’s having a president that we don’t quite hate. Let me explain. According to a study of presidential approval ratings by Ned Davis Research that looks back all the way to the days of President John F. Kennedy, when ...

Since topping out in October 2007, global stock markets have been characterized by two distinct phases: a decline through January/March this year, and then a rebound until mid-May. The predominantly weak undertone of the past few weeks has naturally again raised the question of whether the strength from January/March until three weeks ago has simply been a bear market rally, or whether it in fact was a longer-term upturn in stock markets’ fortunes.

I went on record last year calling a primary bear trend for the US (and most other developed) stock markets, and more recently described the most likely medium-term scenario as a “muddle-through” type of pattern. I briefly want to review a few graphs in this post to ascertain whether this view still makes sense, and then next

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Soaring oil prices were mostly to blame for the past week’s stock market sell-off, but renewed concerns about US economic growth, corporate earnings and mounting angst about inflation pressures also featured prominently in determining the market’s fate.

David Fuller (Fullermoney) commented as follows: “As the world’s most important commodity by far, this surge in the oil price is bearish for the majority of stock markets. Consequently I would assume that rallies seen since March have either been capped or are unlikely to make much upward progress until investors see evidence that crude oil has commenced a medium-term correction.”

The FOMC released the minutes from its April 30 meeting on Wednesday. Members acknowledged uncertainty about what constituted

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The Giant Stealth Bear Market
by Larry Edelson Last year, when the Dow was hovering near its all-time high of 14,198, I issued my forecast that the next big move in the stock market would be a sharp decline to 11,600.

On January 22 of this year, the Dow hit 11,634.82. Since then, it’s been seesawing up and down, gyrating wildly, yet with an upward bias, reaching as high as 13,136.69 on May 19.

What gives with the Dow Jones Industrial Average? How about the S&P 500? And the Nasdaq?

Where are these indexes headed? With all the terrible news on the U.S. economy, why hasn’t Wall Street crashed in one giant bear market? Could it be that rather than falling …

2 interesting articles this week from WSJ and Reuters on the untamed and unaccountable dark pools in the market.What are dark pools?The WSJ defines them as "the secretive electronic trading networks that match buyers and sellers anonymously." These trades are done outside of the traditional stock markets like the NYSE and NASDAQ.The WSJ journal points to the dark pools at failing on their promise of making it easy to move large shares without affecting price. In fact with more dark pool firms competing for volume and their share of the business, the consulting firm TowerGroup reports that the average trade was just 260 shares at the beginning of 2008. A decade ago it averaged over 1,400 shares. Ugly shrinkage.The Reuters article observes that as a result of the competition for liquidity and volume, many dark ...

I've already compared those 2 major finance portals but in reference to stocks screening. You can see my post here. Do you prefer Google or Yahoo? Let me point out some pros and cons.Initial pageYahoo has very well organized structure. It is more than just stock markets. You have all aspects of finance world structured in top scroll down menu. Market summary even for major European and Asian indices. Top stories are excellently highlighted. On the other side. It has advertisements. And no possibility to be personalized.Google offers nice sectors summary where the money flows. You have possibility to see your portfolio already on initial page. You don't see any ads. Now disadvantages. The biggest is top stories. It really misses the way how Yahoo can pick the most important stories and particularly highlight ...

 

A week which has mostly passed me by with respect to the market. So what did happen?

Dr. Joe is looking to nest week’s figures:

 

 

Dollar looks ready to make some headway north, possibly to 77-78 level:

He has given the new Stockchart’s charting features a go:

But there looks to be a breakout in the Dow (Joe doubts it another chart - but it looks good to me). PPO looking strong:

Maurice Walker is now second ranked Stockchart public list; his weekly review makes it one of the best. …

The last week was characterized by investors increasingly taking the view that the worst of the credit crisis was over. They seemed to be shrugging off further substantiation of the dreadful state of the US housing situation, as they digested the latest round of quarterly earnings reports. The latter ranged from plunging profits from Bank of America (ANC) to a dreadful report from Ambac (ABC) to guidance from Microsoft (MSFT) that failed to live up to investors’ expectations.

 

Stock markets see-sawed as investors assimilated the various economic and earnings reports, with the S&P 500 Index eventually eking out a positive return of 0.5% for the week, thereby consolidating the previous week’s gains (+4.3%).

Evidence of a more relaxed undertone among equity investors was confirmed

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