Scary Day for the Markets! Wait It's Halloween!

Today I couldn’t make up my mind with what I wanted to do. I saw an opportunity when WIRE came down. It has come down about $10 to the $27 range after reporting its earnings. The thing that I can’t figure out is why? The company posted stellar earnings of $1.51 per share vs 0.48 a year ago and guided higher for the future. They continue their conservative balance sheet management and their P/E ratio is now around 5.0. So they’ve gone down from $36 to $26 in about two weeks. My take is that I have to take advantage of this and sell SCUR and buy WIRE. I can only get 200 shares but even if it bounces up by half that’s a profit of $1,000 and something I have to take. I don’t think that I can pass this up.

In broader terms, some reports today indicated some economic weakness which seems to have spooked investors. Consumer confidence dropped in October and that caught the bank economists off guard as they were expecting a rise as a result of the recent stock market gains. Once again we see the accuracy of the bank economist’s predictions. The other major negative was the Chicago PMI report on manufacturing fell more than economists expected. Once again, no surprise there. There was also a report that said that employment costs were up. Oil prices also rose. All in all a pretty scary day for the markets.