marketmatters

It's Monday morning and it's the same old, same old: gold surges to a new high; commodities rally; stocks rally; and the dollar is weaker. Traders see this as a no brainer.

Spot gold is strong today, reaching a new high of $1165.45 per ounce, up from Friday's close of $1148.20. On the COMEX, gold traded at $1,165.90, up $19.10 per ounce (each $1.00 equals $100.00). Gold has been spurred higher by central bank and fund buying.

Options traders are betting on gold rising to $1,200 per ounce. That's only $35 away. We could see that in another day of two if current trend continues.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says it looks like the patent worries aren't so dire after all.

Now that we see that health care reform is not going to bring price caps or socialization of medicine, we are beginning to see some real expansion in the drug stocks, including Merck (MRK) (Cramer's Take), Bristol-Myers (BMY) (Cramer's Take) and Lilly (LLY) (Cramer's Take). But there is one drug stock that is continually met with skepticism -- Sanofi Aventis (SNY) (Cramer's Take), the French vaccine and pharmaceutical maker run by Christian Viehbacher. The resistance is obvious, as his biggest two drugs are coming off patent very soon, and his hope is that by 2013 the company might again reach 2008 levels.

Sounds like there's no reason to buy this one. Sounds like its 4% dividend isn't safe.

U.S. stock futures rose Monday morning as investors reacted to rising commodity prices, including a new record for gold, and the dollar's retreat. Further, economists expect job losses to peak in the first quarter. It seems Wall Street is about to join the world markets rally.

The U.S. dollar fell against the euro and the yen Monday, following some escalating tensions with Iran and after Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said the central bank should continue its asset-buying program beyond its current cut-off date. The Dollar Index fell for the first time in three days. What's more, forecasters predict that it will continue sliding, even when the Fed begins to raise interest rates based on supply and demand forces.

What is the Philly/Fed Index and why is it important? The Philly/Fed Index measures manufacturing activity in the Philadelphia area. While it measures only one area of the country, over the years it has been a leading index for manufacturing overall.

Why bother measuring the manufacturing sector? The main reason is that manufacturing accounts for 12% of our GDP. Growth in manufacturing indicates that orders are picking up. If orders are picking up, the next step is to hire more workers. Hiring more workers speeds the growth of our economy and at the same time puts unemployed persons back to work.

Look before you leap! All year long rumors have been swirling around that E*TRADE (ETFC) was on the auction block being prepared for an acquisition by a bigger fish interested in its customers and superior trading platform. I have not used E-TRADE so I do not have first hand experience. However, this has been acknowledged broadly and I have received very positive comments from regular users when I have written about it.

The leading suitor seems to be TD AmeriTrade Holding (AMTD), with Charles Schwab Corp (SCHW) mentioned as perhaps having similar but less conspicuous interest. For Schwab it may be as much about keeping E-TRADE out of a competitors hands as chasing the business.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says traders who focus on the negative will pounce on this poor report.

Thanks for nothing, Dell (DELL) (Cramer's Take)! Given that this market seems to care less about the good like NetApp (NTAP) (Cramer's Take), Ross Stores (ROST) (Cramer's Take) or Limited (LTD) (Cramer's Take) and is focused on the bad, like the semi-downgrade from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, I am sure that Dell will be viewed as part and parcel with the downgrade.

I can't stand Dell. I actually slam it in Getting Back to Even, taking a chance that it would get its act together and make me look bad on the very quarter the book is released. Looks like that was a lot of worry for nothing.

U.S. stock futures fell Friday morning, indicating continued weakness in the stock market. Dell's worse-than-expected earnings reported late Thursday are putting pressure on equities as a whole and technology shares in particular. Investors may be moving toward safer securities in the absence of confidence in the strength of the sector, which has already stumbled the last couple of days.

On Thursday, stocks fell across the board: the Dow industrials were down 0.9%, the S&P 500 declined 1.3% and the Nasdaq composite skidded 1.7%, following an analyst downgrade of semiconductors. This put further pressure on a sector that was already reeling from earnings the day before. Economic reports didn't help to increase investors' confidence Thursday.

French bank Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible "global economic collapse" over the next two years, The Telegraph reports.

In a 68-page report titled "Worst-Case Debt Scenario," SocGen explains that the rescue packages over the past year have merely transferred private liabilities onto government shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems. Debt levels, public or private, are too high as a share of GDP. The deleveraging process will take years.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says the world's economies are getting too strong to obey these downgrades of Intel and TI.

When Wall Street starts looking at tech companies as they would industrials -- as they should be scrutinized -- then we will not get downgrades like Bank of America/Merrill's takedowns of Intel (INTC) (Cramer's Take) and Texas Instruments (TXN) (Cramer's Take).

The essence of these two downgrades is the looming inventory correction that everyone has feared from $14 a share onward for Intel and $18 for Texas Instruments at the start of the summer. At every step I have heard of this coming breakdown, the double ordering and the decline in demand as one analyst after another has warned us of the apocalypse around the corner.

U.S. stock futures declined Thursday morning, pointing to a lower start on Wall Street as investors started weighing the possibility that stocks have run up too far and too fast ahead of the economy -- the economic recovery may not be as robust. The retail sector is in focus with several retailers reporting earnings. The tech sector could also experience pressure.

On Wednesday, stocks ended lower with technology shares leading the decline, and the Nasdaq composite down nearly half a percent. Results from Salesforce.com (CRM) and Autodesk (ADSK) weighed on the sector as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Microsoft (MSFT) were among the leading decliners in the Dow.

Fourteen stocks have been reviewed so far with eight of them potential contenders for 2010. These include some picks from 2009, some old dependables and a few more on the speculative side.

During the year I have written on occasion about selling put options (naked puts) because the premiums offered were very generous and from my perspective assumed market collapse. This was reflected in my July post Serious Money: The world's dumbest market

Today I am considering four naked puts and two more stocks. The options are all based on stocks now in review.

The U.S. housing market continued to show weakness in the latest reading. Here are the Commerce Department's latest numbers:

• Housing starts dropped 10.5% to 529,000 units. The expected number was 600,000.
• Groundbreaking for single family homes fell 6.8% last month to an annual rate of 476,000 units.
• Starts for multifamily homes fell sharply to a 53,000 annual pace, a drop of 34.6%.
• Compared to October last year, housing starts fell 30.7%.

U.S. stock futures edged higher Wednesday morning, a little above the 13-month highs they reached Tuesday, as investors await key data figures, including consumer prices and housing starts. As traders take a breather from the recent runup in stocks, the same trends that pushed markets higher on Tuesday remain: the dollar dropped and commodities soared, driving mining stocks higher in overseas markets.

[Update 8:30 a.m.: October housing starts were down 30% from last year, the weakest since April. CPI rose 0.3% in October on higher energy, car prices. At first glance, these figures may affect the mood negatively. 8:35 a.m.: Stock market futures are declining, indicating a lower start.]

Who is Paolo Pellegrini? Pellegrini is a Rome-born analyst who helped hedge fund operator John Paulson make tons of money in the subprime crash of 2007-2008.

It was Pellegrini who led the number crunching on mortgages and home prices and came to the conclusion that housing prices were about to collapse. Paulson's hedge fund took advantage of this data and proceeded to make $3.5 billion on his trades.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says there is as extreme an aversion to discipline as he can recall.

If you want to know why it is so frustrating to be buying stocks up here think no further than the Goldman Sachs (GS) (Cramer's Take) push into the high-end retail stocks, a push that, even as flexible and chameleon-like that I am, I find flabbergasting.

All year the trade has been to be buying the recovery stocks, the companies that sell the most expensive goods, and abandon the dollar stocks which peaked last year in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s. It was plain as day.