Scotty George Quotations

I think long term, even though we're down today, you're seeing some energy and drug stocks responding in a way that suggests the market believes he is going to cut rates again this year.

I think that we're entering into a season of commonality. Earlier this year we had such a euphoric spike in different sectors at different times, and it was very tough to get a fix on valuation and fundamentals.

Lately, the market has been spiking violently up and violently down. And though we'd prefer it were different, this type of violent movement is appropriate right now. The market has come a long way.

I think we're going to see a successful third quarter, but it's going to be determined by the quality of the earnings.

I think the market today is just perpetuating the uncertainty we've seen in the last few weeks after it hit its highs earlier in the month.

We're really testing the patience of investors who have lost substantial sums of money. We're also testing technical levels, with stocks expanding or retracting as we get near key lows.

What we're looking at generally is whether the market can get past these levels. We think there's enough strong sentiment and stimulus in the pipeline for that to happen and that the earnings will ultimately lead the market, but it's a process, and it's going to take time.

What we're seeing today and what we have been seeing for the last week is a drying up of sentiment as investors wait for some definitive resolution of world events and some new corporate catalysts.

Until we get some sort of clear-cut message about where we're going in terms of the conflict with Iraq, the economic slowdown and corporate profits, fiscal policy, and everything else, we're going to keep seeing this kind of action.

We've really gorged ourselves on stocks for the last eight weeks. The damage is really across many sectors. More than the AOL news -- the market is really tired of the feast. We need to push ourselves away from the table.

With the confidence crisis in the U.S. markets, investors will look to more conservative stocks as prices consolidate, and Burlington Northern is one of these safer stocks.

But more generally, we're seeing a follow through on a lot of the value buying that lifted us in the summer and it's creating some psychological support.

Right now the market is not reacting to fundamentals but is driven by the psychological. That's certainly the reaction you're seeing after the Fed news.

This is an 18-year bull market that is expiring. The bull isn't but the phasing is. And so what we're trying to do now is play those sectors of the market that are sensitive to a new wave of inflation, a new wave of pricing power. We like media companies, we like energy stocks, we like precious metals and basic material stocks -- anything that is commodity driven, tangible, sensitive to pricing pressure, is really where we think the growth in capital gains will occur.

I mean we've had a consolidation but we haven't penetrated any long term support levels, and so, as I said, we're in a period of commonality where traditional market leadership may take hold and make some of us older guys look a little better than the-you know, high tech performers.

Clearly, the market has been on hold with the events in Iraq, and we're now nearing a crisis deadline. Markets love to work with a balance of certainty. After several weeks of selling, we're now looking at some value hunting.

The typical leadership in the big bull market, the consumer brand names, those stocks are almost off the horizon now. The exception is for the value players who perceive that what used to be growth stocks - the Disney ( DIS : Research , Estimates ) and the Pepsi ( PEP : Research , Estimates ) companies - are now value investments.

It's the micro management, the machinations up and down of interest rates, that has really gotten us to the point where we are now, rather than the market playing out at its own natural cycle. So the Fed today, I believe, will take a look back at the landscape, assess what they've done, and probably use August to evaluate whether or not to come back in and raise rates.

This lateral consolidation could persist through May. But that's not a negative. The longer the market can sustain this lateral consolidation, the more of a base it can create to expand.

The market has been in a lateral consolidation for the last six to eight weeks, and we're seeing a continuation of that. Having broken through some technical resistance levels, it is appropriate that there has been some profit-taking. But the general trend of the market remains positive longer-term.