By Clyde Noel

Stock Report

If you have the courage to hold your stocks rather than sell them in this economic downturn, you will do fine. The market is still vulnerable to outside events, but if you add to your portfolio instead of selling, you will be further ahead in the long term. Don’t worry about buying at the bottom.

Going back over the last decade, there has never been a time when government spending policy, the tax rate and interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve is as conducive to business and investment as it is now. Although we are in a recession, the U.S. economy is sound, with no threat of a depression, because of government policy.

The market did great last week until the news of the anthrax case reached the market floor Friday, and then it dropped 150 points. But the major indices rose for the third straight week.

The Nasdaq was up 98 points (6.1 percent) to 1703, which is above the Sept. 11 pre-attack level. The Dow Jones industrials gained 224 points (2.5 percent) to 9344, and the Town Crier stock index was up 11.04 percent because the major high-tech stocks said their business was not deteriorating any further.

Pleasing to many Silicon Valley investors of large cap high-tech stocks were: Adobe, up 10.11 percent; Cisco, up 13.45 percent; Hewlett-Packard, up 11.55 percent; Intel, up 13.93 percent; KLA Tencor, up 17.24 percent; LSI Logic, up 26.96 percent; and Yahoo, up 16.71 percent.

With all that exuberance, we need to be reminded the market is still extremely vulnerable to military events. Victories mean confidence, and people continue to invest. Losses, and people sell to play safe.

Uncertainty and uneasiness is still causing people to stay on the sidelines, but some investors are nibbling away at stocks that have good fundamentals.

Noel, a seasoned investor, covers the stock market for the Town Crier.