High profile earnings rolling out this morning are largely beats including McDonald’s and Microsoft.   The news came just in time for Mickey Ds, whose stock was breaking down and remains in a downtrend even with a three dollar pop at the open, while Microsoft could reach a new all-time high that has been sixteen years in the making.   More recently, Microsoft has been a juggernaut after management deftly shifted its focus on the cloud.

Additional winners include: PayPal and SAP.

Despite these high profile earnings beats, the market is looking to open lower in part because there is more Fed official jawboning and angst over the next rate hike.

I would love the market to move lower on a justifiable rate hike as that knee-jerk reaction would create opportunities.  The lesson learned today is quality names come back even when it takes 16 years (see MSFT). 

Today, we are back to closely watching critical support points for major indices.  The S&P 500 held at 2125 a couple of times on a closing basis, and that’s become an important number, although, 2,100 looks like the number that must hold.

S&P 500