After reading this artcle i feel extremely luck to be invested in this stock right now.Im sure a lot of you would concur.It looks like we could see oil at $100 a barrell sooner than we thought.
Reuters) - An escalation of Middle East fighting and crude oil prices close to $80 a barrel will create more angst on Wall Street this week, just as the quarterly earnings reporting season hits full swing.
If that doesn't give investors enough to worry about, here is one more thing. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is set to appear before congressional committees on Wednesday and Thursday to testify about the Fed's semiannual monetary policy report.
Two major U.S. economic reports, notably the Producer Price Index and the Consumer Price Index for June, will be released this week, along with the minutes of the Fed's most recent policy-setting meeting. Economists polled by Reuters expect that the PPI and the CPI rose in June, in the overall figures and the core indexes, excluding food and energy.
Wall Street will watch the PPI and CPI reports for signs of whether the pace of inflation is picking up, and comb through the Fed's minutes for clues on when the central bank might take a break from raising interest rates.
The violence in the Middle East, though, will keep Wall Street on edge.
"The real concern is not so much Israel going to Lebanon, but it's whether Israel is going to threaten Syria," said Steve Goldman, a market strategist at Weeden & Co. in Greenwich, Connecticut.
"With Iran's backing of Syria, that would bring up a whole new issue. It's this lingering concern, which makes it tougher for stocks to rebound at this juncture."
Last week, Israel launched a military assault against targets in Lebanon after two of its soldiers were seized and eight killed.
The assault drove the price of crude oil up on Friday to a record $78.40 a barrel in electronic trading, fueling concerns that U.S. consumers may cut spending as their gasoline bills soar.
For the past week, the Dow Jones industrial average(^DJI - news) dropped 3.1 percent, while the S&P 500 index (^SPX - news) shed 2.3 percent, while the Nasdaq (^IXIC - news) lost 4.4 percent.
HOPING FOR A Ceasefire
Analysts said if there were any signs over the weekend that the Middle East tensions might ease, then earnings will take center stage in the week ahead. That could give the market a catalyst to crawl back up out of its slump.
"The geopolitical risks are a stiff headwind," said Joseph Quinlan, chief market strategist at Banc of America Capital Management in New York.
"Over the weekend," he said, "we do need to see a ceasefire ... Hopefully the G8 can craft some kind of deal that lowers the temperature," he added, referring to the Group of Eight summit of industrialized nations, which meets through Monday in St. Petersburg, Russia.
But "if things continue to boil, oil prices could break through $80 a barrel, and that would weigh on the stock market early on Monday
