30 Quotes by Alan Kral

People have been looking for reasons to buy. There's so much money around and that places the bias in the market on the upside.

I think people are just not going to respond to what the Fed does if it's only 25 basis points (a quarter point). In order to have any kind of impact he has to change people's actions, he has to change what people do.

The AT&T thing gets some money flowing around into the mergers-and- acquisitions end of the business, which is adding some froth. The underlying bias is on the upside until bad news comes out, and I don't think the bad news is over.

We'll continue to see volatility for two reasons. First, there's no straight line of good numbers continuously coming out of the economy.

We pick those two for their exposure to the domestic market. We think the recovery in Asia is lifting demand and has re-established a floor under oil prices, and we don't expect prices to drop any time in the near term.

We like the oil stocks. Oil has been in the dumpster for several years. We're starting to see the price hikes. Oil is up over $30 a barrel. This ought to be positive for these companies.

We think the rally in Nasdaq over the past two weeks is really a relief rally. The relief is they don't think the Fed has to go any further.

Two that need to be looked at are J.P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch. J.P. Morgan because they have been heavily involved internationally over the last couple of years, and Merrill Lynch is the leading retail financial brokerage stock in the country. How they did coming out of the fourth quarter is very important.

The defense sector has had quite a run over the past 18 months. As people start to anticipate a war scenario, we're seeing a little froth in these stocks.