Sloan Sessions: Summer rally time?
TEXT OF INTERVIEWSCOTT JAGOW: There’s an old saying on Wall Street about investors taking profits before summer vacation. “Sell in May, then go away.” Newsweek’s Allan Sloan is with us. Allan, is this year gonna be any different?
ALLAN SLOAN: Well I don’t know, I wish I had enough to sell so I could afford to go away. That’s the thing I love about Wall Street: Any season except for October, where they’re always so pessimistic, every season the rally is coming. And now it’s time for the summer rally. I mean this is an annual ritual.
JAGOW: Well how could there be any more rally than what we’ve seen already this year?
SLOAN: Well I don’t know but since I didn’t see the rally we had coming — or I would call it the price increase ’cause a rally comes when you’re behind like in baseball — since I didn’t see this coming Scott, I have no idea what’s coming down the road. All I know is, if I had known what the stock market would do at the beginning of this year, I would have hawked everything, put all my money into stocks and I wouldn’t have to do this anymore.
JAGOW: But there does seem to be something to the whole idea of a lot of investors taking the summer off so there’s lighter volume.
SLOAN: Well that’s true but if you look at where trading comes from, I mean trading is now predominantly by institutions rather than people. I don’t know about you, but every big money person I know has a Blackberry, has you know 700 devices and is linked in and trades from Nantucket or their vacation homes and stuff like that. So I think the idea of the summer break is not what it once was when you had to pick up the phone and people had to hunt you down and no one had cell phones and nobody had Blackberries.
JAGOW: Well obviously this year it has been something else and the momentum keeps going with more mergers and more buyouts and more profit reports. It’s gotta run out of steam sometime.
SLOAN: Sure it does. It has to run out of steam. Something has to change and it will. The question is: What will change and when will it change? And those are unfortunately the answers I don’t have. But I’m definitely looking forward to a summer rally.
JAGOW: Alright Allan thanks a lot.
SLOAN: Any time Scott.
JAGOW: Allan Sloan, the Wall Street editor at Newsweek. In Los Angeles, I’m Scott Jagow. Thanks for listening and have a great Monday.
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