Weekly Wrap

I'm a little nervous to be writing this week's market wrap. It's halfway through the day on Friday, and I have to run out the door to parent-teacher conferences. I can stay home to see how the market closes so I have asked our Chick behind the scenes (who is really a rooster but we call him Chick-a-T... for Tim) to post the closing numbers. As it stands right now, the market is UP for the week.. .but you never know in this crazy stock world what might happen in the next couple of hours. Hmmmm... let me think... parent-teacher conferences or wait until the market closes?

If there is ever any investment advice I can give you without the risk of being sued, it is this; Parent-Teacher conferences are more important than any stock market numbers. We need to remind ourselves of this every now and then.

A Little Secret
I have to let you in on a little secret. The way the market has been going, and the disgust I've felt over the volatility, I pulled a fast one. You know how every once in a while you like to look at your portfolio? You pull it up on your computer and see it's daily returns, year-to-date returns and overall returns. Lately it has been pretty glum. Well, on Tuesday of this week, things looked much brighter. Everything was up!! That was it, I had to copy it and save it. This was going to be how I remembered it. Up. I called up Chick-a-T and said, "Could you please put that up on our website because I can't take another day of looking at last month's returns." I know this is not fair, but I did the same thing with my personal portfolio and showed it to my husband at dinner. Phew. The market was turning around...or so I was pretending. Here is how our portfolio was doing as of Tuesday. (And it looks pretty similar in the middle of this Friday.)

Now that I've pretty much said it's okay to pick and choose which days you want to print your portfolio, I should really tell you some stock news of the week.

Stock News
What I found the most interesting was that somebody finally bought Quaker Oats (OAT)! And guess who it was? Pepsi. (PEP) Get this, Pepsi now owns all of these products: Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Mist, Slice, Mug Root Beer, Gatorade, Aquafina, Lipton Ice Tea, Frappuccino, SoBe Teas and Juices, Tropicana products, Dole Juices, Doritos, Ruffles, Tostitos, Rold Gold, Funyuns, Cheetos, Cracker Jack, Cap'n Crunch, Life Cereal, Aunt Jemeima, Rice-A-Roni, Quaker Rice Cakes and Oatmeal. Can you say Buy What You Know and Repeat Purchase? We are going to have to pull Pepsi through the Chicks Dozen in the next little while. This is too big to be true. If you'd like to read more about the acquisition, read this SmartMoney.com article.

Market News
Also in market news... a bunch of earnings warnings. This is becoming not news anymore, and I'm sick of reporting it. But, nonetheless, there were more. Intel was the biggest which validated reports of a slowing PC industry. The others this year were, Apple, Gateway, Motorola, and Dell. I guess no one is getting new computers for Christmas unless they do some serious shopping in the next three weeks.

Best Buy did some serious shopping this week and bought Musicland. They were not happy with just one CD, so they bought the whole dang store. Chick Julie should be interested to know this, as she is a Minnesota girl with a vested interest in BBY stock. Musicland (MLG) shares soared on the news, and BBY shareholders are still trying to decide if the $425 million purchase was worth it. I hope they got some deals on the old Petula Clark albums and are willing to sell them to me.

Speaking of Downtown... I gotta run. I have to find out if my children have been bad or good this year. It will all reflect in their stocking.

Chick Karin

Oh, I almost forgot, Chicks bought EMC. Check out the Chick Susie's Chicks' Dozen report on EMC this coming Monday. Third time pitching it was a charm for her!

Closing Market Numbers: