Over the weekend, the German Finance Minister lowered expectations of a definitive agreement between the 27 countries in the European Union being reached on how to best stabilize the financial system. The Europeans really need to get their act together and come to some sort of agreement on how they can work together and start to straighten out this mess before the problem escalates to what could be a crisis situation...and until that happens, I still remains cautious on the markets.
On the home front, Citigroup, one of the largest global financial company's in the world, came out with good earnings that exceeded expectations. The company's global businesses continue to improve and even despite the financial problems in Europe, they remain optimistic on the prospects for the remainder of the year and into 2012. The stock is trading 2% higher on the day to $29/share, and my price target on the stock continues to be around $45/share over the next 12-15 months.
I'm not actively buying any stock today, but I monitoring the price action as I expect the market to take a short breather and digest the gains we've seen over the past several weeks.
