By Clyde Noel

Stock Report

The up and down pattern in the stock market will continue several more months. In the past six months every time we had a market uptick, like last Friday, the increase was erased within days.

Seasonally, August is usually a fairly slow month, but this summer it’s the slowest in years so there is nothing to get excited about. Since the bottom was made in April, the market has been treading water ever since with no volume on the buy side.

There is no theme in the market right now, so it’s important to look carefully at individual stocks. The tax rebates and a Fed rate cut on Aug. 21, when the Federal Reserve meets, will help the market to recover a bit because there’s a lot of money on the sidelines and incomes are still rising.

The stock market action last week was depressing. Although the Dow Jones industrial average rose on Friday, for the week it was down 96.53 points or one percent. The Nasdaq composite ended the week down 109.86 points for a loss of 5.3 percent.

With four out of five stocks on the Town Crier index down, the index closed with a 5.84 percent decline. Big losers were: Adobe Systems, down 10.25 percent; Applied Materials, down 10.32 percent; KLATencor, down 10.14 percent; Veritas, down 11.80 percent; and Yahoo, down 13.71 percent.

The basic question is, when will the economy bottom out? No one is predicting when, and investors still have concerns about how long it will take for the economic recovery, and when companies will start delivering better returns for their shareholders.

Stocks will continue to tread water this week. Early Monday morning the Dow was down again. Investors will continue to retrench until a few earnings reports from key companies. The market will continue in a narrow trading range until the Fed meeting Aug. 21.