Today's dismal performance from the markets wasn't so much about
the jobs program speech from President Obama last night, but
instead about news that ECB Executive Board Member Juergen Stark
will be stepping down from his post. Various sources mentioned a
conflict over the central bank's controversial bond-buying program
may have led to the surprise resignation. At this point, there
shouldn't be too many surprises when it comes to the daily
headlines out of Europe. Trying to get two countries on the same
page is a difficult task, let alone 17 member countries in the
Eurozone.
Despite the European banking crisis, the U.S. dollar continues
to remain weak (although we have seen a mini-rally the last few
sessions). This fact certainly helps multi-national companies here
in the states maintain recent profit margins. Seeing the 10-year
treasury note trading with less than a 2% handle is surreal, as we
continue to try and factor what the bond market's message is.
Anyone saying the U.S. is not acting like Japan of the last few
decades will certainly have a tougher case to argue against with
these sort of developments.
Burgers Were Cold in August
Looking at today's market action, McDonald's (
MCD
) had an uncharacteristically tough day following the company's
monthly sales update for August. As subscribers know, we had
removed the stock from our
Best Dividend Stocks list
recently, advising investors to not put any new capital in the
stock. MCD could certainly get interesting again if the selling
gets a bit carried away. Meanwhile, supermarket play Kroger (
KR
) was lower as we continue to see supermarket chains struggle, with
one exception being Whole Foods (
WFM
).
Texas Instruments (
TXN
) was able to reverse earlier losses following the company's
tightening of its profit expectations. The stock had pulled back
quite a bit this year, so market participants likely had already
factored in the company's cautious tone. Elsewhere, Wall Street
analyst downgrades pushed shares of Moody's (
MCO
) and Corning (
GLW
) lower. The SPDR Gold ETF (
GLD
) finished lower despite the weakness in equities.
Monthly Income - Tough to Retire Without It
A new report by the Insured Retirement Institute reiterates the
message we push here at Dividend.com about planning for your
retirement. According to the study, only 54% of the respondents
have tried to calculate a financial goal for retirement, just 45%
have consulted with a financial planner and 43% do not consider
themselves knowledgeable about making financial investments. When
asked to name the most important feature of a retirement investment
product, the most popular answer was "guaranteed monthly
income."
Each and every day here at Dividend.com, we try not only to find
the best dividend stocks for one's portfolio, but also to keep our
recommendations as current as possible for those looking to put new
capital to work. Whenever we downgrade a name from our recommended
list, the stock becomes a "Hold" (only in rare cases do we
determine it's better to sell and alert investors to ring the
register on a particular name).
I try to keep our message in the forefront whenever possible.
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Looking ahead to next week, quarterly earnings will be fairly
light as we will feature results from Best Buy (
BBY
), Cracker Barrel (
CBRL
), and several others.
Be sure to catch up with our latest watchlist updates this
weekend on
Dividend.com Premium
, including reports on earnings/story stocks, analyst
upgrades/downgrades, dividend ETFs, and much more. And as always,
you can view our current recommendations on our industry-leading
Best Dividend Stocks list
.
Be sure to visit our complete recommended list of the
Best Dividend Stocks
, as well as a detailed explanation of
our ratings system here
.