The market news this week

I think this week's market news is worth reviewing. You can see my calls from last weekend here. Things went pretty much as expected. If you owned the Finance Wonk stocks you had an excellent week.

The housing starts numbers were up a lot more than many people expected but since we're headed into the summer building season I wouldn't think of it as a big deal. A decrease would have been meaningful, but the upside surprise is more neutral than news.

Weekly crude inventories were up significantly, cancelling out the previous million barrel decrease. We are continuing to see an oil market that is high but meandering.

Leading indicators were down an impressive 0.6%. The only reason we didn't see more market effect of that is that this was within the range of estimates as the number approached.

Durable goods orders are down 0.3% and it's making the news, although the expectations on this site were for a drop of up to 0.5% based entirely on the change in orders at Boeing from last year. In fact you can do the math and see that spending is strong, but Boeing front loaded their sales in a big competition with Airbus last year and they will be delivering to last years orders into 2012.

All together the weeks news items were perfectly reasonable and we should be able to hold the market together into next week. Monday I'll post more analysis on next week - which should get pretty exciting around thursday or friday when a lot of news comes out.

Finally the most important indicator: this site has had more than 5,000 unique visitors and we continue to get a lot of return visits as well. This indicates an increase in educated investors :)

Invest well,

FW