The Stock Market's finished a holiday shortened week on a positive note and again a positive

week, although the gains soured into the close.

At one point, the Dow Jones was up about 500 points and it managed to close up just 92,

very close to the lows of the day.

All of the indexes surrendered large portions of their gains into the close.

The Nasdaq, of course, made another new record hide today.

It's the only index that did.

But the regional bank index finished in the red on the day.

That index was up about 4% in the morning, but it surrendered all those gains.

What caused a lot of the optimism this morning was the better than expected non-farm payroll

numbers that were released a day early because tomorrow was closed in observance of the

July 4th holiday.

We actually got the non-farm payroll numbers on the same day that we got the unemployment

numbers, which normally doesn't happen.

Now the markets were already positive prior to getting these better than expected numbers.

When they got the numbers, there was even a bigger rally.

But again, the numbers are really insignificant.

I think the sell-off in the bank stocks really proves that because if we really had a strong

economy, it's the banks that would be benefiting because the reason the banks are in so much

trouble is because the economy is so weak, a lot of the companies and individuals that

the bank loaned money to are not able to repay the loans.

If the economy really was as strong as everybody claims, then the banks would be going up because

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