Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Tuesday. The S&P 500 was up .08% today, and it really was a decent day altogether. It was up for most of the day, the Dow was up for most of the day. The Dow also ended up down, but the NASDAQ and the Russell 2000 actually ended “up” today. So, a kind of a mixed market, nice breather from what happened yesterday, but probably not enough to offset the momentum that we have to the downside. Lots of dip buying coming in all the way through all of this, but just not enough to offset kind of what’s been happening on the downside.
So, one of the things I think we need some type of a positive catalyst that can get the market going, and one of the problems is right now there really aren’t any that are happening at this time, and there are so many different things that people can focus on the negative side, that is really allowing the market to come down. And really the scales are kind of out of balance, with the negative focus being a lot higher than the positive focus.
I think that the catalyst very likely will be the… resolution of the debt ceiling here in the US. I think it’s one of the main things that’s driving this market down. It’s very scary that we can’t pay our bills and these types of things. Defaulting on some of these debts; does not sound like something we definitely want to do. And we’re looking at a political situation where there’s a lot of saber rattling going on, and so that’s driving the market downward. But I think that once that’s resolved, which I do expect it to be done, then you’ll see a jump to the upside, and that might be the thing that gives us momentum to kind of get us going again, and by that point in time, of course, maybe there’ll be some better bargains, which also creates momentum.
We have to keep in mind that so far, the market is only down a little over 3% from its all time high, so that’s not too bad. Maybe it gets worse than that before this debt ceiling situation resolves itself. The other things that we see that are out there, China’s probably the most concerning; we’ll have to see what happens there. Almost everything else was already there in August, when the market went up over 3%. So, I think we’ll see what happens here, as far as this debt ceiling goes. I believe what’s going to happen is that they’re going to pass something in the house, try to make the Senate vote on it, to point out who votes against it. And then eventually, they’ll do some type of a reconciliation bill, as far as that goes, to get this through.
I do believe at some point in time, there’ll be pressure coming from the outside on both parties to try to get something done. That’s not really an option to not do this. So that’s the big picture, really right now. If you can kind of focus on that debt ceiling, you can kind of see what happens. And again, I think it’ll get a little worse before it gets better, but I do believe that that might be the catalyst. Maybe there’ll be some opportunities down there in terms of you know, being able to buy it, some of the prices. We’ll see what happens as far as that goes. So anyway, look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you.