• Both the Dow and the S&P; 500 set new closing highs today in the wake of Ben Bernanke's latest remarks. The indexes soared over 1% following the Fed chair's comments yesterday evening on quantitative easing. Bernanke said the economy is not yet ready to handle tapering the $85 billion a month bond buying program. Markets worldwide rose on the remarks. Meanwhile, on the economic front weekly jobless claims hit their highest mark in two months. The Labor Department says there were 360,00o new claims last week, up 16,000 from the prior week and higher than expectations which were for about 340,000.

    Microsoft (MSFT) climbed nearly 3% on its restructuring plan. After much anticipation, CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled the plan this morning. It moves away from a hierarchy based around divisions overseeing particular products. Instead the corporation will now institute a horizontal scheme with managers who honcho specific functions which are applied to multiple product lines. Ballmer said the main

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  • With July 4th behind us it's time to start focusing on back to school, at least as far as American retailers are concerned. With traditional Christmas sales now starting the day before Thanksgiving and in some cases showing up right after Halloween, it shouldn't come as a big surprise that companies are attempting to train customers to go straight from barbeques back to the classroom.

    Hitha Prabhakar, retail analyst and author, says consumers better get used to what she calls "the back-to-school creep." The middle of summer is a graveyard for retailers. Everyone who needs a swimsuit, grill or baseball bat is already equipped by the end of June. With temperatures soaring the last thing on anyone's mind is buying a sweater.

    Those doldrums end with a rush. As Prabhakar notes in the attached video, the National Retail Federation estimates that $84 billion will be spent getting ready for school this year. The season is second only to Christmas when it comes to consumer spending. The fact that the average amount spent on school has grown more than 40% since 2011, makes the idea of starting back-to-school deals as early as June irresistible to merchants.

    In a stagnant economy stores are going to strike when the iron, or in this case the pavement, is hot. "Retailers feel that the consumer is not expecting a lot of stability in the coming months therefore they want to get them early," Prabhakar explains.

    Just because it makes sense for the retailers to try to get you to buy your notebooks now doesn't mean you should. The deals are going to get better when the days get shorter. "A lot of these retailers start discounting their merchandise as they get closer to the actual back to school day in August." she says.

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  • Today marks the beginning of a new segment on Breakout called "The Trade" where we don't just talk about markets, but tell you the best way to play the day's hottest stories. All opinions are my own. It isn't advice on what to do with your portfolio, your money is your own. The Trade is about explaining the facts at hand and telling you what I'd do with my personal portfolio.

    Today's Trade: Market Vector's Gold Miner ETF (GDX), commonly referred to as its ticker symbol. The GDX is designed to trade in line with the fortunes of the most prominent gold mining companies in the world. Companies like Barrick Gold (ABX), Goldcorp (GG) and Newmont (NEM) are three of the largest component companies.

    Now that you know what it is here's the story, as discussed with Yahoo! Finance senior columnist Michael Santoli in the attached video. The GDX is more than 5% higher today driven by a more than 2.5% rally in gold prices. The ostensible driver of the gold rally is Ben Bernanke's comments regarding the future of interest rates. As has been the case for the last 18-months, gold needs a specific catalyst to justify a rally and no excuse at all to plunge.

    Which brings us to the miners.

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  • In late May, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke triggered a month-long sell-off in stocks and bonds when he told Congress that substantial improvement in the economy could see a scaling back of the central bank's bond-buying program within the next few months.

    Today, exactly 50 days later, the magical monetary maven has managed to find exactly the right tone and message to soothe and inspire investors all over the world: "Highly accommodative monetary policy for the foreseeable future is what’s needed in the U.S. economy."

    "I think Bernanke is outstanding. You hear all these cross-currents, the bond market is doing something and people start making misrepresentations, and he just comes and calms the waters," says Don Hays chairman of Hays Advisory Group in the attached video. "From the get-go, he's told it the way it is — and I think you can really trust Bernanke."

    Maybe so. But it would be hard to argue that he said anything really different and that the only thing that changed was the market's interpretation of his oft-reiterated reminder that Fed policy is data dependent.

    To be sure, Bernanke (or whoever replaces him) will have to walk a tight line in transitioning market psyche to one that believes as much in the economy as it does in the Fed.

    For Hays, the past seven weeks are a good example of a bond market that is frequently wrong, overreacting once again on little more than speculation.

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