Wow, what a week we have just been through. Markets have been really tossed around all week on basically one issue: Will we see a Lehman-like collapse for Deutsche Bank (DB) ? Of course, we had auxiliary issues like OPEC and oil, yields, the Fed and central bankers from all over the world chiming in constantly all week long, as well. However, the focus was on the possible collapse of Germany's biggest bank. Its shares closed up 14% on 10x the average trading volume for the last three months.
It seems this past Friday was all about mergers and acquisitions. If the rumors all come true we are going to have one heckuva Manic Merger Monday in tech land. You have chatter about Qualcomm ( QCOM) buying out NXP Semiconductors ( NXPI) , whispers about Disney ( DIS) looking at Netflix ( NFLX) , a sell-sider saying he thinks a deal between Broadcom ( BRCM) and Xilinx ( XLNX) makes perfect sense and, of course, you have the tweety-bird tweets on Twitter ( TWTR) and Google ( GOOGL) , Disney (yet again) and Salesforce ( CRM) .
Squeezed in between was the continuing brouhaha at Yahoo ( YHOO) where a couple of years ago Yahoo had been hacked into and data from the accounts of about 500 million users had been compromised. To top it off, Yahoo hid the fact from the world, including from the account holders themselves. Nice job, Marissa Mayer.
For those of us waiting for any respite next week, I am afraid we are all out of luck. We have a full slate of Fed presidents yet again, beginning with Jeffrey Lacker and Charles Evans on Tuesday, Lacker again Wednesday, followed by Stanley Fischer, Loretta Mester, Esther George and Lael Brainard on Thursday. Talk about markets getting yanked around this way and that way.
On the tech land earnings front, we have Micron ( MU) (also a long-rumored takeout target incidentally) Tuesday, and thankfully that is that for tech earnings. In non-tech we have the likes of Monsanto ( MON) , Helen of Troy ( HELE) , Ruby Tuesday ( RT) and Constellation Brands ( STZ) to deal with.
It's been an exhausting week for me, and I am going to wrap it up here on a lighter note.
There were two economists who were shipwrecked on a desert island. They had no money, but over the next three years they made millions of dollars selling their hats to each other.
With that, I wish each and every one of you a safe and joyful weekend with your loved ones.
(NXP Semiconductors and Google are holdings in The Street's Action Alerts PLUS portfolio; Disney is part of Trifecta Stocks and Qualcomm is a holding in Dividend Stock Advisor.)
