Monday Close

S&P 500 1,099.15 -.78%
NASDAQ 1,836.49 -1.37%

Leading Sectors
Airlines +.38%
Utilities +.17%
Telecom -.11%

Lagging Sectors
Internet -2.05%
Semis -2.28%
Biotech -2.59%

Other
Crude Oil 42.35 +.17%
Natural Gas 5.23 +.02%
Gold 409.40 -.15%
Base Metals 108.20 -.21%
U.S. Dollar 89.69 -.09%
10-Yr. T-note Yield 4.18% -1.10%
VIX 15.44 +4.96%
Put/Call .84 +12.0%
NYSE Arms 2.59 +153.92%

After-hours Movers
None of note.

Recommendations
Goldman reiterated Outperform on SYMC, NEM and PDG.

After-hours News
U.S. stocks finished lower today on the lowest volume of the year as buyers failed to materialize on worries over terrorism at the Republican Convention. After the close, Samsung Electronics, the world's largest memory-chip maker, may increase production of dynamic random-access memory chips because prices haven't fallen as much as for flash-memory chips, the Wall Street Journal reported. The benchmark 10-yr U.S. Treasury note rose for the fourth day in five after a measure of inflation was unchanged in July, Bloomberg reported. Surgery and other procedures to clear heart arteries are just as effective as drug treatment in the elderly and cause no more complications after a year, according to research in the new issue of Circulation. Merck's Zocor failed to reduce complications in the first four months after a heart attack, according to a study that may give an edge to Pfizer's Lipitor medicine, Bloomberg said. Crude oil futures in New York fell for the sixth session in seven, to $42.28 a barrel, as a decline in political unrest in Iraq reduced concern that supplies from the fifth-largest Middle East producer will be disrupted, Bloomberg reported.

BOTTOM LINE: The Portfolio finished lower today as weakness in my biotechnology and technology longs more than offset my declining steel shorts. I exited a few of my biotech and tech positions in the afternoon after their stop-losses were triggered. Thus, the Portfolio is now 100% net long. While today was unexpectedly weak and disappointing for the Bulls, I am not reading too much into it at this point. Trading activity was exceptionally light and measures of investor anxiety rose. Moreover, interest rates and energy prices continue to fall. I still expect stocks to rally as the week progresses. However, if the major U.S. indices fail to rise later in the week I will assume that the weakness I anticipated later in September has begun.