Hugh Johnson Last Quotations

never got the impression that margin debt was part of the support for Internet stocks until the last two months.

It is a down week after some predictable profit taking following a strong January. But the excuse for that profit taking was the Fed. We walked away from last Tuesday's meeting in which they raised interest rates, knowing that they will likely raise rates again at their March meeting.

Today the market is pausing a bit, given the strong performance last week.

Today the market is pausing a bit, given the strong performance last week. There is lot of acquisition activity, which is giving the market some lift, particularly because oil prices are stable.

We did have a little rain last Friday and Saturday, but this is the biggest rainfall we've had in months.

The stock market has been closely connected to the bond market in the last two weeks, and today's stabilizing interest rates is probably the No. 1 reason behind the gains.

You had a pretty good move in biotech this year, and biotech really has quite frankly lifted the health care and the drug stocks recently because investors have become somewhat defensive -- say in the last month or so -- and have also, on a relative basis, performed fairly well.

I'm referred to as a fundamentalist -- a person who cares about company earnings and where the economy is going -- but the truth is I'm a closet technician. I've learned something as we've moved through the bear market: The last people to find out about a problem are research analysts and fundamentally oriented strategists.

The durable goods numbers are telling us that businesses are spending money, and that the outlook for the economy is solid. And after last week, the earnings numbers are encouraging. So we're seeing a good bump today.

The truth is with Harley-Davidson, like a lot of other companies, like Wal-Mart and Target, we've seen ongoing, strong demand, ... Harley-Davidson's production has had to ramp up 15 percent per year for the last 10 years. That's pretty impressive and it's all been done to meet that ongoing demand.

They are going to be looking back on the last two weeks and noticing the small caps have come back to life.

It seems so tied to the price of oil, that it's very hard to forecast what stocks will do next. On balance the message of the markets for the last nine trading sessions, including today, seems to have shifted to say that the price of oil is taking a chunk out of consumer spending.

The market is asking the question, given oil prices, given rates, given China's economy and other things, what does it look like for the economy and corporate profits in the fourth quarter and in 2005? The message we got last week was that it's probably not going to be as great as everybody once expected, but it will still be just fine.