And now that earnings season is in full swing, we can point to actual company actions for driving the stock market rather than vague musings on Europe, unemployment, or "the January Effect."
All 30 stocks in the Dow were up this week, but tech and banking dominated. The top seven gainers were in those two sectors:
Company | Weekly Stock Price Move |
|---|---|
| Bank of America (NYSE: BAC ) | 7.0% |
| Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ ) | 6.2% |
| IBM | 5.2% |
| Microsoft | 5.2% |
| Intel | 4.9% |
| Cisco | 4.5% |
| JPMorgan Chase | 4.0% |
In banking, generally favorable reports from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley? gave hope to a beaten-down sector. Keep in mind that these reports weren't especially strong on an absolute basis. Rather, any decent news in banking sends shares skyward ! because expectations are so low. Nowhere is this more true than Bank of America. Hence its Dow-leading position this week.
Meanwhile, in tech, the company-specific good news at IBM, Microsoft, and Intel drowned out the market's poor reaction to non-Dow techie Google's earnings (Google was down 6.2% this week). We see that in Hewlett-Packard, whose business model is more tied to the fates of IBM, Microsoft, and Intel than it is to Google.?
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