Big Snow in Northeast
I shoveled 20 inches of snow yesterday. I don’t feel much pain today, but I suspect my body hasn’t caught up to it yet. With the storm coming in on Sunday, (our usual shopping day), we decided to go get our groceries on Saturday evening. Big mistake. The shelves were quite bare, and people were roaming around with 6 of this item and 4 of that. It was panic buying at its best! People now have enough to last them 3 to 4 weeks. Of course, the snow is mostly melting now and I hope their food doesn’t go bad before they have the chance to eat it!
I was hoping though that my Campbell’s Soup Stock would go up drastically, but sadly no. I watched as people grabbed 4 or 5 cans of soup and rubbed my hands with glee. I think that’s the fun part of owning stock. I can get excited when I see people buying the product. I’m sure the grocery store was happy too!
Another spreadsheet
I have created a small spreadsheet which I am finding interesting. It looks like this:
Sel Sector:Enrgy SS SPDR 0.49% Energy
Sel Sector:Mat SS SPDR 0.02% Materials
Sel Sector:Ind SS SPDR -1.34% Industrials
Sel Sctr:C D SS SPDR In -2.12% Consumer Discretionary
Sel Sector:C SSS SPDR I 1.25% Consumer Staples
Sel Sector:HC SS SPDR 1.10% HealthCare
Sel Sector:Fin SS SPDR I -3.33% Finance
Sel Sctr:ComS SS SPDR -1.23% Communications
Sel Sector:Utl SS SPDR 0.76% Utilities
Sel Sector:RE SS SPDR In 0.13% Real Estate
Sel Sector:Tech SPDR -1.68% Technology
It shows the changes of a series of Sector Specific ETFs from State Street. I don’t own any of these but I see it as a good way to see what sectors are doing well and which are not. Also, on my Google Finance page, I have a list of the indexes for all these sectors as well, and the numbers match almost identically. Today’s shows that Tech, Consumers Discretionary are down with Fin stocks being the biggest loser. Even Industrials were down too, but Healthcare and Utilities were ok with Consumer Staples were up. The interesting thing is that a lot of the readings are the direct opposite of that they were last week!
I’m going to continue to watch this just to see if it gives some kind of over all picture of the state of the market. But I suspect that it will just be a big roller coaster ride and won’t really tell me anything. We will see. I don’t think that investors have really decided on where they want to put their money, and they are just shuffling from this to that. Like musical chairs. And when the music stops?
