As fear of a debt crisis in Europe continued to worry investors the markets were dragged down 1% today.  While not too big of a drop the Dow is now below the 10,000 level for the first time in more than three months.  Despite the debt fears however the Dollar fell versus the Euro after hitting a six month high.  This slight decline allowed for a jump in commodities and energy stocks which have been hit by a rallying dollar.  The tech heavy Nasdaq was the leader among the three main indexes with declines of just ,7% as some big name technology shares managed to cling to gains on the day.  HPQ and Google were two big technology names that saw a jump in their share price after a strong sell off in the tech sector last week.

The Fiscal Frenzy Portfolio Challenge is entering round two with the next winner to be selected on March 1st.  All portfolios have been reset so if you have a portfolio be sure to pick new stocks.  If you are looking to join the game to win a $20 iTunes giftcard there is a link on our homepage and joining the game is free.

Fiscal Frenzy is looking to make a large position of the portfolio based in technology for the next two months as we see a big rally in that sector set for the near future.  A green energy play that we are going to move into however is APower (APWR).  This is a company that manufactures wind turbines and power grids.  This stock can be used as a short term or long term play.  The stock has recently dropped and is in a position to rebound nicely while in the long term view the stock will be a leader in the green energy field.  The stock is down more than 44% since December 22nd of last year (click for chart) and finished todays trading session at $11.40 a share after hitting a $21.04 just over a month ago.  Fiscal Frenzy thinks this stock is in a good position to make a run and thus, make you money.

After spending most of today’s session down the indexes managed a late rally to finish in positive territory on the day.  The Dow finished up 10 points and the Nasdaq finished up 15.   Earlier in the trading session the Dow fell more than 160 points in the middle of the trading day but the lowest stock prices in months brought in buyers.  A debt crisis in Europe caused much of the sell off as investors began shifting their money into the Dollar which rose to a 6 month high versus the Euro.  This jump in the dollar caused a sell off in gold, commodities, and stocks that were benefiting from a weaker dollar.  The market rally today was led by technology stocks which have been the most hardly hit this year and also yesterday when the Nasdaq fell 3%.  Cisco and Intel both jumped more than 2% while Apple was up 1.7% on the day.  Also today a jobs report was released but over shadowed by the worries of the European financial system.  Businesses across America cut 20,000 jobs in January which is lower than the December number of 150,000 but still weaker than many expected.  The unemployment rate fell however to 9.7%.  Perhaps the biggest news out of this jobs report was the revision of the number of jobs lost in the recession: 8.4 million.  The previous estimate was 7 million.  Despite this negativity the markets managed gains after hitting their lowest levels in months yesterday.

While the unemployment rate fell significantly below 10 percen as we had predicted last night, the month of January still had job losses rather than gains. Employers cut nearly 20,000 jobs compared to our prediction of 9,000 jobs gained. Nonetheless, the unemployment rate fell, in line with our prediction, making us believe that the 20,000 jobs lost number will be revised downward next month. We’ll have more on this and the market reaction later today.

Today bad job numbers for the week came out sending the Dow to it’s lowest level in three months. More importantly, it made many, including us, less likely to think we’ll be seeing substantial job growth. Nonetheless, based on the model we’ve run for the past several months we still see some positive job numbers coming out of tomorrow. While many economists are now predicting job losses for the month of January, we believe there will actually be a decrease in the number of jobless. Based on a regression between the weekly job numbers of a month and the monthly numbers, we are seeing tomorrow as yielding around 9,000 jobs gained. Furthermore, we expect the unemployment rate to drop down to 9.9 percent as companies are finally hiring. Check back with us tomorrow to see how our predictions fared and what we think of the actual numbers.