Walt Disney Co. (DIS) shares never broke stride the day following the holiday-weekend box office flop by big budget film “The Lone Ranger.” The stock was up 1.2% Monday morning, half again as strong as the Dow Jones industrials. And that makes perfect sense.

The Johnny Depp Western collected $48.9 million over the extended July 4 weekend, less than 20% of its reported $250 million production cost. The movie saw serious competition from Comcast Corp.’s (CMCSA) family blockbuster sequel “Despicable Me 2” (Universal Pictures), as well as from public indifference to the 80-year-old pre-television-era tale.

This marks the second “everyone-saw-that-coming” failure of a stale character in as many years, following last year’s Western-on-Mars gambit “John Carter,” whose weak ticket sales prompted a $200 million writedown by Disney and appears to have cost a studio chief his job.

[See related: ‘Iron Man 3′ Vanquishes Doubts Over Disney’s Marvel Buy]

Beyond the fizzle to the strength

In that

All the tinder capable of supporting market flare-ups is piled at investors' feet as Wall Street enters the Independence Day holiday Thursday.

Consider this: The monthly employment report reliably makes traders nervous as a cat. Vacation-thinned market sessions can make for whippy index moves. Whenever major overseas economic news breaks when the U.S. is observing a holiday, pent-up responses build up for the next day’s opening bell. A slow-motion coup in Egypt is fueling a fear rally in the oil market.

And, these days, the Federal Reserve’s open expectation that better job-growth news will allow it to reduce its stimulus project raises the stakes for all economic-data releases.

All these elements add up to what could be an interesting day on Friday, when U.S. markets reopen for a full trading day following the July 4th holiday.

The numbers game

At 8:30 a.m. ET on Friday, nonfarm payrolls for June will be released, allowing traders who choose not to take a four-day summer weekend to

If, as the Wall Street adage goes, the time to buy is when blood runs in the streets, then investors should prepare, sadly, to start picking up emerging-markets stocks.

Even before the sometimes-violent anti-government unrest in Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and Egypt began playing out on cable news, and a bank-funding crisis shook China, investors were souring on emerging markets.

After more than a decade of blistering economic development pulled in an outsized share of the world’s capital — thanks to China’s export-and-building boom and natural-resource riches surging from South America to Russia — the gears in the EM growth machine started to get stripped.

Commodity prices have been falling (although crude oil on Wednesday shot above $100 amid the crisis in Egypt). Central-bank money creation has fed inflation in emerging economies rather than developed ones, catalyzing mass protests in Brazil and elsewhere. Inflation – along with weakening currencies that make it harder for emerging

The sharing (many would call it over-sharing) by Federal Reserve officials of their plans for eventually reducing the flow of money being directed into financial markets has firmly fixed Wall Street’s twitchy gaze on every quantum of incoming economic data.

Now all Wall Street needs is some confidence that the coming summer news on the economy and corporate profits will be good enough to substantiate the sturdy performance of stocks in the first half of 2013.

The two broad areas that will soon come under high-stakes scrutiny are the employment “tell” for June, and second-quarter company results in a patchy-at-best world economy.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s clearly stated intention to sunset the central bank’s $85 billion-per-month bond-buying program in, perhaps, a year  rattled markets that had grown complacent by "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" thinking. Good economic news early this year meant better profits and a still generous Fed; bad news meant an even more resolutely solicitous

June is when spring turns to summer, but this year it’s felt like fall for investors in nearly every market.

Bonds have tumbled in value, from Treasuries to corporate debt to municipals, as the focus on a possible end to the Federal Reserve's asset-buying prompted heavy withdrawals from fixed-income funds. Gold is collapsing and is on its way to posting the metal’s worst quarter on record. Non-shiny commodities have also been weak. Emerging markets have led the declines, as China’s banking system heaves. Stocks are down from their highs of May, though they’ve bounced the past couple of days.

This recent across-the-waterfront swamping of most every investment market raises two key questions: Where is the money that is exiting these assets going? And what happened to the balanced interplay among markets that produced offsetting movements and flattered a diversified portfolio?

The question of where the money is going is far more complicated than it sounds. While it’s common to

Ben Bernanke is not the first Federal Reserve chairman to send a message that investors took as unduly hostile, thwarting a strong stock-market rally even as a financial storm brewed in Asian emerging markets.

In early 1997, deeming the U.S. economy on a sturdy growth course, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan surprised the market with a quarter-point boost in short-term interest rates – despite inflation levels that the Wall Street Journal editorial page said required “a microscope” to see.

When Greenspan acted in March 1997 – just a few months after his famous musings about how to diagnose “irrational exuberance” in financial markets – the Standard & Poor’s 500 index had been on a roll, having gained 21% over the prior six months. Investors threw a bit of a fit at having Greenspan disturb their party, dropping the stock benchmark by 6.7% over a few weeks before it rebounded to surge powerfully to new highs through July.

This Fed-induced gut check didn’t do much lasting damage for a couple

The recent cloudburst of higher interest rates has turned world stock and bond markets soggy with fears of an economic slowdown and swamped bond portfolios. Yet, off to the side, a small group of companies stand sheltered and smirking, comfortable beneficiaries of the approaching prospect of higher rates and jumpy bond markets.

Discount brokerage firms, derivatives exchanges and managers of money-market funds have lured the investor cash fleeing more traditional financial stocks, whose businesses could take at least an initial hit with the recent lift in interest rates and any more that could come.

Since the start of May, when Treasury yields bottomed and started rising, shares of discount brokers Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW) and TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. (AMTD), futures exchange CME Group Inc. (CME) and money-market asset manager Federated Investors Inc. (FII) have each soared between 15% and 27%, compared with a flat Standard Poor’s 500 and broader finance-stock sector.

Last week,

Only a few days ago, the leading Wall Street debate was whether central banks had too much control over the financial markets. Suddenly, the nagging notion is whether central banks are losing, or surrendering, control.

Since Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Wednesday set out the likelihood of curtailed “quantitative-easing” bond purchases late this year, interest rates have shot higher, with the 10-year Treasury yield surging above 2.5% Friday from 2.17% before he spoke, sparking a 560-point tumble in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in two days.

This is popularly viewed as a simple re-pricing of bonds in anticipation of the Fed backing away from its current $85 billion monthly purchase of Treasury and mortgage debt. Yet, it’s not clear the Fed wished for rates to whistle higher at this pace, given all of Bernanke’s caveats that economic data alone will steer his course.

After the Fed meeting, Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch,