Morning Market Report

The markets were relatively quiet yesterday. All three indices were up. The Dow was up 44.29 points and finished 10291.26. That continues a high for the Dow for the last fifteen months. First time jobless claims just came out and they were at 502,000. That's the lowest in almost twelve months. That number reached its highs of over six hundred thousand in the summer. It's been bouncing between 550000-600000 up until the fall. In the last few weeks it's dropped toward 500,000.

That said, I've always found this number to be rather useless. The latest BLS report showed a loss of 190,000 jobs for the month of October. That was slightly worse than September. That's all while this number was improving. Still, this number usually does move the market in the short term. That hasn't happened much yet this morning, however. Dow futures are down about 20 points. They were down slightly worse than that before the number. Bonds are also relatively unchanged. The ten year is trading at 3.47%, or at almost the exact same level it closed at Tuesday. The yield spread between the two and ten year bond is now at 2.64%. That's relatively unchanged as well but still at a very large spread. Bonds in both Germany and Britain were relatively unchanged. German bonds were all slightly worse but each has gained between one and two basis points. Meanwhile, in Britain, the picture was mixed but none of their bonds gained or lost more than two basis points.

Oil is down slightly this morning. It's currently trading at $78.64 a barrel or down 64 cents a barrel. That's giving back most of its gains yesterday, however.

We had mirror images in the Far East and Europe. We had across the board down indices in the Far East and the opposite in Europe. The Hang Seng in China was down 1.01%, the NIKKEI in Japan was down .66%, and the Straits Time Index in Singapore was down .52%. In Europe, the FTSE in London was up .43%, the DAX in Germany was up .39%, and the Spanish index was up .57%.

In currencies, the dollar is showing strength this morning. It's up .37% against the Euro, up .08% against the British Pound, and up .6% against the Japanese Yen.