NEW YORK (CNN/Money) -
Last day of the quarter and it sure feels good! Ahhhh, now that's the way it's supposed to work. Get your 401(k) statement in the mail, and OPEN IT!
Even a late-day slip-up on Monday couldn't diminish the spectacular gains that the second quarter brought. Indexes up between 15 and 25 percent! Yippee! Of course it may all be ending as we speak -- still, it sure feels nice!
Dow slipped 3 to close at 8,985, while Naz fell 2 to 1,622. Hey watch me, Stripperella (Stan Lee still has it!), I mean Andy Serwer, on CNN's "American Morning," "In the Money" and Headline News. Read Loose Change to hear about WorldCom on HBO! Here's what is going on:
STOCKYARD I like how Wal-Mart says that the warm weather finally caused a burst of buying at their stores. Damn right. WMT sold 1 million Harry Potter books, too. (Not in South Carolina!) Harry is the greatest intellectual property of our time, right Hank Gilman? (Welcome compadre.)...
Malden Mills (of old Lawrence, Mass.), remember them? The feel-good company, maker of Polartec fleece. Had a big fire in 1995 but CEO Aaron Feuerstein became a national hero when he kept payroll going. Company went bankrupt in Nov '01, and now expects to emerge from Chappie 11 in August. Feuerstein, whose family controlled the company for nearly 100 years, loses direct control of the company, but is still involved, and has an option to reassert control if he raises $92 million, which he says he wants to do. Go Aaron!...
Interestingly, INTC, MSFT, and CSCO were all up. Other big winners on the big board: Disney, H-P, and Home Depot...
Favorite headline of the day: "Texas Instruments to Build Texas Chip Plant." Where'd you think they'd build it -- Oklahoma? (In Richardson to be exact....) New words in the latest edition of Merriam-Webster: "Dot-commer," "comb-over" and 'McJob." Man, I'm leaving!
QUARTER ENDS Okay now comes the hard part. If the stock market is a leading indicator, well it just did some leadin'! And how! We just had the best quarter in years for the Dow and Nasdaq -- since 1998 on the S&P 500! So now the economy is going to have to stand up and deliver...
The rest of the week is a wash, by the way. They want to finish the quarter and then bail out for the 4th of July weekend. Half-day on Thursday and off of course on Friday...
Watched "Jason and the Argonauts" lately? Me neither. Just who were those Argonauts anyway?
(OF HUMAN) BOND-AGE Spoke with Tom Croft, head of DuPont's fixed income asset management business. Very interesting. He's running a strategy called CORE-plus. The CORE part is matching an index, like the Lehman Bond, the plus is him finding a place to add value to juice the return. Right now he's still in high yield corporate.
"Oh, and you're smarter than Warren Buffett?" I say to him. (This is because WB was in junk and then publicly said he was out and that the party is over.) Tom said no, he wasn't smarter than WB, but that it was possible for them to both be right. True. The spread on junk to Treasuries is still 500 basis points and defaults should continue to decline. Be conservative and say the cap gain is over here, the coupon alone is a doozy.
Other plus strategies (sounds like Lane Bryant?) have been Chinese toll roads (where Croft said he made excellent money for five years or so), and emerging debt. The latter being attractive right now (no news is good news from that part of the world). Dollar and inflation are good for them. Emerging debt may be his next plus move. That or Z tranche mortgages, but that's a whole 'nother story. As for Tom Croft, he's from Ohio. Likes the Bearcats, but like any good son of Ohio, the Bucks are his real love.
Loose Change
From Mike C: "Watching HBO's 'The Wire' Sunday. There is a scene between a drug dealer and his economics professor. The dealer asks the professor what he should do to maintain market share given the fact he has an inferior (drug) product. The professor says, 'Do what the new CEO of WorldCom did, change your name.' "...
Pray for Becky Hammon! Right, Erica?...
Wag on Wall Street asks: Is Stanley O'Neill trying to create the next Bear Stearns? Ouch!...
Good stuff here...
Bad Albums from Crazy Larry: "How about Blue Cheer? some people tolerated their bad rendition of Summertime Blues, but very very few could listen to the rest!"...
How about Matsui??? Comin' on!
Andrew Serwer is editor-at-large of Fortune magazine.
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