Bux Weekend Report February 8 2009

This last week was an exciting one; the market indexes rallied, ending on a strong note with the Dow up 217 points on Friday. The action was so great that the Nasdaq actually closed up for the year. We had a terrible jobs report on Friday which showed that including January, jobless claims rose to 7.6%. The indexes rallied off this news because the loss in jobs wasn’t as bad as some expected; in addition, this Monday Timothy Geithner will discuss what will be done to clean up banks. Wall Street also came to the assumption that the current stimulus package has too much “”pork”" in it and therefore a new one will have to be drafted.

Last week two sectors which I saw on a tear were basic materials, and technology. Copper prices have been seeing some support from Chinese demand due to their stimulus plan and this helped companies such as Freeport McMoRan (FCX), BHP Billiton (BHP), Vale (RIO), Apple (AAPL), and Research In Motion (RIMM), just to name a few. Along with copper, fertilizer stocks such as Potash (POT) and Mosaic (MOS) probably got some support due to an Argentinean drought which is helping to bolster soybean prices.

Devon Energy reported full year earnings of $8.08 per common share. For the fourth quarter they reported a net-loss of $15.42 per share. This loss was because of Devon’s accounting policy which is called full-cost accounting. Their rigs operating in the first quarter of 2009 will be decreasing as there is a glut of natural gas in storage and it needs to be worked off before it makes economical sense to produce more. On Wednesday the stock got hammered and didn’t recover for the week.

For the upcoming week we’ll be seeing what the Stimulus plan will contain and if it can get passed. In addition, some of the economic data coming out will include International Trade on Wednesday, Jobless Claims on Thursday, and Consumer Sentiment on Friday.

This week the markets will likely focus lots of their attention on government and economic data.

That’s all for today folks.