Friday, July 31, 2009

Wrapping Up a Nice Month

Today is the last day of July, and unless disaster hits today, we should be wrapping up the best month for the stock markets in almost a decade, and the best July in 20 years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up a whopping 8.4 percent in July alone, which would be the best monthly performance since 2002. The Nasdaq is up 8.1 percent this month, and the S&P 500 up 7.3 percent. The Dow and the S&P 500 both reached their highest level since last November 4.

We'd talked before about companies that had beat analysts' earning forecasts earlier this month, such as Apple. Dow Chemical, MasterCard and Motorola joined the club this week, and all saw their stocks soar. According to Bloomberg News, three out of every four companies in the S&P 500 that released results since June 17 have exceeded analysts’ second-quarter profit estimates.

This economy still has a long way to go before it can be considered fully healthy, especially in the area of unemployment, as we've been discussing lately. But this has been a good month on a lot of other fronts, and it's quite possible that we're really coming out of this mess.

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