I took a short spring break last week with my family and visited the amazing landscape of Hocking Hills based in southeastern Ohio. If you’re looking for a fun weekend trip, I’d give it an enthusiastic nod. The terrain reminded me a great deal of northern California, thanks to the many hemlock evergreens brought by glacial deposits from Canada millions of years ago and very cooperative weather. The caves and rock formations were quite striking and kept me wondering, was I really in Ohio?
In a similar vein, last week was a nice one for the stock market that has everyone wondering, is it for real? Are we witnessing another bear market rally or the start of something more sustainable? The economy will recover at some point, but are we at that point now? Will economic data that has been “less bad” give birth to data that is a “tad better”?
Several economic releases are due out this week that will likely give us further clues on the answer to this question. In particular, we’ll get leading indicators from both the service and manufacturing sectors on Wednesday and Friday of this week. If the data is “less bad”, the stock market may continue to do well from here. But if not, we may need to chalk recent gains up to the bear market rally variety.
Over the weekend, I was able to get a head start on some outdoor spring cleaning and even flipped five patties on the Smokey Joe last night. But, as I left for work this morning, I was greeted by a dusting of snow.
Hey, even Mother Nature’s got game.