NEW YORK (ETF Digest) — The set-up for the day began with last night’s spectacular earnings news from Apple (AAPL) and continued with Ben’s news conference. In it he forecast a lower unemployment rate by the (cough) election and if that didn’t happen he’d launch another round of QE. Inflation doesn’t exist and weather is what drove economy higher early in the quarter and lower recently. You need not know anything else.

Durable Goods Orders (-4.2% vs -1.5% expected & prior 1.9%) sank to the lowest level since (gulp) 2009. But Ben would probably attribute this to the weather I guess since markets didn’t care. The transportation component plunged a monthly 12.5 percent in March after rising 1.8 percent the month before. Subcomponent weakness was led by a 47.6 percent plunge in new orders for nondefense aircraft (Boeing orders). Defense aircraft increased 15.5 percent while motor vehicles edged up 0.1 percent.

The focus was on Apple and Ben which both produced a tsunami for tech to surf on and the rest of the market just sort of tagged along. And the Facebook IPO is just around the corner. And interesting article from Time magazine reflects how frustrating hot IPOs can be with a quote from yours truly.

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Click to research the Computer Hardware industry.

See the article here: Big Wednesday for Markets: Dave’s Daily

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