Weekly Reports | Mar 23 2012
By Greg Peel
Is Wall Street at a tipping point? Next week sees the books for the March quarter close on the Friday and there already appears to be an urgent desire by fund managers to lock in the gains made on what has otherwise been a rather spectacular quarter in stock market terms. US economic data continue to look healthy but it's the global picture now concerning the markets. A break down back through Dow 13,000 would likely spark accelerated selling, while a breach of Nasdaq 3,000 would not be helpful either. This would probably require Apple (I erroneously called this America's second largest company the other day – it's actually much bigger by market cap than Exxon now) to see some decent profit-taking.
US data next week will feature the Chicago Fed national activity index, pending home sales, the Case-Shiller house price index, consumer confidence, the Richmond Fed manufacturing index and durable goods orders before culminating in the final revision of December quarter GDP on Thursday. (Actually it's not really “final”, given both the December and September results can potentially be dramatically revised at the first release of the March quarter result.)
Once into April, focus will again be on US corporate earnings. After successive quarters of strong earnings growth there is concern this quarter might just bring some growth reduction.
For Europe watchers, Germany's influential IFO survey is out next week and the UK will revise its December quarter GDP estimate.
It's a fairly quiet week in Australia, featuring the RBA's Financial Stability Survey on Wednesday and private sector credit on Friday. On the local stock front we have only the one earnings report out next week, being Nufarm ((NUF)). The ex-div season continues but is beginning to ease back.
For a more comprehensive preview of next week's events, please refer to "The Monday Report", published each Monday morning. For all economic data release dates, ex-div dates and times and other relevant information, please refer to the FNArena Calendar.
