the dax up in the last few minutes of trading. now it s trading down slightly. that could be some kind of profit taking from yesterday s gains. but the markets have really been doing extremely well over the last half of a year. they re hitting five-year highs. and to a certain extent, the way we always talk about markets being driven by confidence, it seems investors are clearly quite confident that the americans the u.s. was never going to default on its debt. they made the right bet in this case. thanks very much, diana magnay live in berlin for us. china was very vocal about the u.s. shutdown. beijing urged u.s. lawmakers to reach a deal and avoid default. stakes are high for beijing, one-third of the u.s. debt is foreign held and the biggest chunk of that is owned by china. nearly $1.3 trillion. let s go live to beijing. david mckenzie joins us with more on this.
newsroom, 33 minute past the hour. big gam big gains yesterday, the markets opening lower. alison kosik, good morning. count them up, 23 record closes for the dow this year. number 24, yes, it may have to wait. stocks are beginning in the red. dow down 95 points. not much new information to trade on today, you may see this profit taking happen throughout the session today. plus, yesterday s good news, yeah, it could turn into today s bad news. here is why. an improving u.s. economy makes some investors worried that the federal reserve will pull back its financial support of the economy too early. that support, it s been a huge factor in this year s big rally. as we head into today, though, the dow up more than 17% from the year and every time it feels like stocks will be headed for a pullback, they end up yet another record high. not sure that will happen again, we said this before, still in the loss we see holds, it will be the third loss in five
more than 1% right now. the pmi showed a slow down in exports which signals weak global demand this adds to the weak gdp numbers out of china a week ago showing that the economy is slowing to 7.7% gdp. the u.s. dollar fell after the weaker than expected pmi reading came out. the nikkei fell by 1/3% but this is from profit taking. the yen strengthened today as the dollar fell and one japanese stock we are tracking are the maker of the dreamliner battery it was down 3/4% by the close. we will be watching the move of the took now that boeing says that the repairs are being made on the battery.
out their original principle and keep it going. when you have so many people talking about profit taking, my concern is the little guy is getting it in the end and the big guy is getting out. if your money had gone in at in october of 2007, when things were feeling good and you invest and all of a sudden you now just made back all of that money, so you are now skittish but stayed in. i m going to take my money and go. what you need to do is not look at the market as an index. that may only go up 1% tore 2% for the year, s&p 500 or the dow. sectors are beaten down and undervalued. caterpillar which suffered because china is slowing down construction. that s undervalued. stocks on the s&p 500 and dow pay 3%, 4% dividend. you can t be sloppy here is $1,000. i m putting it into the market. you want sectors, geographies. you want values. they re a little harder to find.
the consumer has if the jobs don t come back and profit taking. this is the most important one. at some point, people are going to start to say, i got 10%, i got 15% over the last year, i m going to start to take money off the table. and invest it in something else. that s when you start to see the market. we re both in agreement that generally speaking most people should be invested in a balanced way of all the time. but just because we re setting records doesn t mean you shouldn t be in the market right now and just because it is setting records doesn t mean you shouldn t be. one last point, if it is money you re going to need in the next year, 18 months, you should not be buying stocks right now. it should be risk capital you re putting in the stock market you don t need to use. right? that s right. the end of the quarter, check your 401(k), check your i.r.a., see how it is doing, rebalance it, sell some of the winners. we ll be back with more. all right. thank you.