Looking to the week ahead, investors are no doubt hopeful that the advances over the past two weeks will continue. However, more cautious, some may say pessimistic, Wall Street players warn that the market correction experienced recently may not yet be over. Bearing in mind that this recent stock recovery appears to have been driven primarily by technical and trading activity, rather than addressing and correcting underlying issues that had been a catalyst to the early-summer sell off in the first place, analysts have noted that another market dip is very likely on the cards, but not necessarily in the immediate future.
Monday should be relatively quiet, with no market-moving reports expected. The National Association of Realtors is due to release its existing home sales index on Tuesday morning, with expectations being that the index will have climbed to 6.10 million units for the month of May as compared to April’s 5.77 million units. The Federal Housing Finance Agency will also release its housing price index for April. Sticking with the housing sector, Wednesday sees the release of the May new home sales index by the Census Bureau, which is anticipated to have declined to 427,000 units as compared to the 504,000 units of the previous month. Wednesday also sees the publishing of the US government’s weekly crude oil inventories report.
Thursday starts with May’s durable goods orders report from the Commerce Department, and ends with Oracle reporting quarterly results in the evening. Also on Thursday is the report on the number of Americans filing new unemployment claims, as well as continuing claims statistics. New claims are likely to have fallen from 472,000 to 458,000 last week, whereas continuing claims – the measure of unemployment beneficiaries who have claimed for a period of a week or more – is expected to have risen from 4,571,000 to 4,580,000. The week draws to a close with the revised GDP reading for the first quarter being released in the morning, with expectations that it will have remained at a 3 percent growth rate. Also of interest on Friday is the final reading on consumer sentiment for June, which is also expected to remain unchanged from the previous reading of 75.5.
