Since our last Blog on June 7, the market has moved positively in spite of many predictors. This is while news headlines have reported repeatedly on Greece possibly defaulting on their debt, a possible slowdown in the US economy, as well as the U.S. debt ceiling problems in Washington. In fact, just last week the market was up 4%. And since our last post (June 7), see the changes below…

DOW Jones +1.1%
S&P 500 +0.3%
Nasdaq +1.8%
Note: June 7 close through July 1 close; Source: Yahoo! Finance

There is a saying that many times proves itself true… ”The stock market climbs a wall of worry”. What this means is that the stock market can go up in spite of lots of bad news. Since June 7 this appears to be the case.

Going forward on a short-term basis it’s impossible to predict the stock market. However, as far as the economy we could see some slow improvements caused by increased supply shipments from Japan since the earthquake (helping manufacturers such as auto, technology, etc.), and declining gas prices. Just this morning we have seen that Factory Orders released today for May showed a +0.8% improvement over April. We will keep our fingers-crossed hoping this slow-down is just a temporary “soft patch”.