Art Hogan Last Quotations

My guess is we're going to have some positive action after last week's selling. We're in the last week of the month and the last week of a quarter, so there's some momentum there. If the stream of economic data is as positive as it's been, we're going to see some strength from that.

Some people are taking advantage of the run-up we've had in the last couple of days in tech land to regroup a little bit,

Last week energy and interest rates were the focus on Wall Street. It will probably be the same this week, as well as a few mid-quarter updates,

Last week, we were worried about a sluggish economy, Wednesday it was back to inflation,

We have just digested so much news in the last week or so, ... Fourth-quarter earnings have been much better than expected, but you have people reluctant to make big bets ahead of things like the payroll report Friday, or the G7 meeting, which will be important for the dollar.

We're seeing a nice handful of earnings today. That is going to be the driver. The other driver, or the thing that's not going to hold us back this quarter, and I would argue has held us back the last three quarters, is the consensus is the Fed is done for the year, ... We don't have a credit tightening cycle to go through and we're seeing terrific earnings. So I would argue that the focus returns now to earnings growth, revenue growth, the strength of corporate America and not necessarily the macro-economic themes like monetary policy which have been on the forefront for the last couple of quarters.

We're seeing better earnings news in corporate America. That's what the market is celebrating, ... We made major collateral damage to stocks in the last six weeks and over a larger 2-1/2-year period. What's happening now is that the market is bottoming out and is building a higher support base in the process.

We need to see more than the 1,000 jobs added last time. You want to see closer to 200,000 jobs added.

We had a terrific week last week, ... Investor sentiment has shifted to people not wanting to miss out on any strength. There's a lot of cash on the sidelines.

Fifty-two percent of the households in America are invested in the U.S. stock market and they want to invest in the things that had 70 percent growth last year, ... As long as the money keeps flowing into equity mutual funds and they are targeted toward Nasdaq stocks, we are going to see this go on for a while.

I think 50 basis points (one-half percentage point) is a credible consensus estimate for what the Fed does (at its March 20 meeting). Unfortunately, over the last five or six tumultuous trading days, we've talked ourselves into the fact that the Fed cares about equity valuations, but that's not the case.

The concern (about ECB rates) is that the firmness we've been seeing in the dollar is because they were raising rates and the Europeans weren't, ... If they start raising rates, that firmness evaporates, and our investments don't look as attractive as they did last week.

It's the first time we've seen a change of verbiage in the last 10 meetings or so, ... We're now a couple of meetings ahead of when they'll stop tightening.

We expected it to happen by the end of the year, certainly not in the first quarter. The last thousand points have really been at breakneck speed.

There's a lot of improvement priced into the earnings, and provided we see confirmation of that, we should be able to keep gaining over the next few sessions, ... But if another major household name -- like GE last week -- were to disappoint, you could see some selling.

The last few weeks of December tend to be more defensive.