Gary Millichip's  Instablog

Click here to access the latest S&P reported numbers. As of 10/22/2009, 190 companies representing 50.9% of the S&P market value had reported. Filtering the data and excluding financials whose numbers are manipulated and government assisted, only 40 issues as indicated below have year-on-year increases in revenue:

I am as amazed as anyone else at how quickly the stock market has rebounded and attribute this to the fact that people are relieved that the economy is not facing Armageddon, but rather a recession. This of course reinforces why you should keep at least partial positions in the market at any point in time, otherwise you miss out on the recovery in the stock market which typically occurs prior to the recovery in the economy. With this is mind, I believe the Buy & Hold (B&H) strategy is still the way to go for the individual investor, albeit with a loss mitigation strategy to minimize the downside risk. Here are a couple of reasons why:

-         “If the average investor abandons "buy & hold" as a long-term strategy, he/she will find themselves competing with market insiders who have access to much more timely information and are much more experienced at trading on a short term basis. For most investors who've got day jobs and lives outside of monitoring their portfolio 24/7, competing with these pros will be an unmitigated disaster.” (http://www.fundalarm.com/wwwboard/messages/249027.html), &

This is a follow up to my post on April 23^rd and highlights just how bad things have actually become. Below are the latest S&P 500 reported earnings as of the close of business on 5/06/09 (http://www2.standardan...):

Below are the latest S&P 500 reported earnings as of the close of business on 4/21/09 (http://www2.standardandpoors.com/spf/xls/index/SP500EPSEST.XLS). Double click to access:

Here is what the Howard Silverblatt, the S&P Senior Index Analyst has to say about reported earnings so far: