There will be blood all right and not just in oil which suffered a steep drop to fall for the first day in four. As Twilight tweens screamed to see another gory story at the box office S&P 500 equities endured their worst bloodbath of the month. This after the Big Board’s opening bell was rung by big wigs at a Beijing based blood bank. Suffice to say its shares slid in common with myriad other banks after more mortgage-backed pessimism from Meredith.Meanwhile analyst advice against bottom fishing for chips caused semis to slide. See also Inventory in Semiconductors ...

My wife rented The Taking of Pelham 123 last night and as a huge Denzel Washington fan I was pumped to watch it. I’m not sure where I nodded off but I woke up to see the ending credits rolling and my wife popping the DVD out. But it turns out she fell asleep too and woke up only seconds before me. Guess we’ll try again tonight.Asian stocks ended lower. The Hang Seng and the Nikkei were off 0.13% and 0.63% respectively. European stocks were in negative territory early this morning too. And here in the US we’re currently ...

I’m walking the garbage out to the curb last night (in the pitch dark I might add) and I rolled my ankle. Two things happened: immediate swelling (it’s currently the size of a tennis ball) followed by uncontrollable swearing (which my neighbor was privy to). Neither was good.Asian stocks were down overnight but not by much. The Hang Seng and the Nikkei were off 0.3% and 0.03% respectively. European stocks were in negative territory earlier this morning too. And here in the US we’re currently trading higher.Here’s what I’m focused on this morning:Seagate Technology (STX): The disk-drive maker served ...

The Dow and Nikkei each ended off though they remain above the 10 000 mark which both recently breached to much fanfare. (Of course go back two and twenty years respectively and the benchmarks were over 14 000 and almost 40 000 but that’s another story for another day.) Laggards included Meredith Corp. (MDP) (-2.48%) and Whitney Holding Corp. (WTNY) (-7.74%) Meredith Whitney was unavailable for comment. Sherwin-Williams (SHW) painted the tape -- if not the town -- red with a 6.39% swoon. And Beantown was beaten down as Boston Scientific (BSX) (-15.65%) led S&P 500 laggards and Boston based State Street (STT) slumped 8.31% ...

There wasn’t a lot of news today but investors were happy to take stocks to new year-to-date highs while waiting for the bulk of earnings announcements later in the week. The S&P 500 hit a new intra-date high for the year today at 1100 before closing at 1097 or a gain of 0.93%. Since the S&P 500 tagged its 50-DMA over two weeks ago the index has closed higher 9 of the past 11 sessions. On today’s Buzz and Banter Professor Kevin Depew gave his thoughts on were the S&P 500 may be headed.  "The S&P 500 will record ...