The Nasdaq was able to shake off the lousy jobs number today, and is up 31 points in mid-day trading. Apple, Dell, and Verizon are also way up – at around 3% each – as the market waits for Washington to come to terms on another bailout relief bill.
The tech sector has much invested in the outcome, with tens of billions of dollars earmarked for technology research, especially in the green energy sector. Right now, the bailout bill is at $900 billion and growing, and passage isn’t guaranteed.
Still, Wall Street seems content to wait. Some analysts are even saying that’s stocks are poised to rise, and remarkably so, in the coming months.
While watching Tech Ticker this morning, I saw Todd Harrison, CEO of Minyanville, the edge personal finance portal, say that he sees a “monster move” in the stock market by the next 60 days.
Harrison has hardly been a bull in the past year, accurately predicting the Dow’s demolition in 2008, so he could well be worth listening to. But now he’s calling for a Dow Index at 10,000 – about 20% higher than it is right now – by spring.
His biggest play is financials, likely because they’ve fallen so low there is only one way to go – and that’s up. To get in on the action, Harrison says to plow some money into Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley. Again, the new bailout bill is the catalyst. As written right now, that $900 billion cash cow has another nice pay day scheduled for big banks, and the three Harrison mentions above should be in the front of the line.
During the broadcast, Harrison offered some guidance on how the new TARP bill; should be structured, to maximize its impact.
-- Immediately suspend all dividend payments for TARP-recipient banks, including dividend payments to the government and other investors.
-- Convert the government's preferred holdings to common stock and offer the same terms to existing preferred shareholders.
-- For the top 25 largest financial institutions, separate the good assets and businesses from the bad.
-- Let smaller, troubled banks, fail and create an RTC-like entity to deal with the management and sale of their assets.
Elsewhere, Cisco’s CEO is less than bullish on the economy. While reporting Cisco’s latest quarterly numbers, CEO John Chambers told analysts on Wednesday that the global networking behemoth will feel the brunt of the ongoing global recession. He said that Cisco expects to see revenues slide by as much as 20%, a far cry from the 11% that analysts are calling for in the third quarter. But in the last quarter, Cisco revenues only fell by 8%, well below what analysts had estimated.
Right now Cisco has no plans for playoffs, but Chambers hasn’t ruled them out.
"We are not going to consider (layoffs) at this time," he said. But he added, that if Cisco was forced to cut jobs, it would likely be a large cut of about 10% of its workforce. Cisco employed 67,318 workers worldwide at the end of the second quarter.
It could be worse for Cisco, and these days, that's enough for a lot of investors.