As we used to say. Maybe we still do. We do. Of course we do. You can see there the dax in particular up 1. 69 off of not a bad overall year as we look at yearly returns. How is the tenyear note yield doing you ask . There it is. 2. 25. And of course crude and natural gas crude in particular, so important in the movement of the market, down yesterday. Market down. Up today, well see whether the broader equity market follows through. We have the latest s p caseshiller home price report. That was released just a moment ago. The results being shown, you can see them at the bottom of the screen. It looks like a decent october. 5. 2 annual increase based on what they saw in october. 2015. Verses a 4. 9 increase in september of 2015. San francisco, denver and portland continue to have the hottest housing markets in the country, at least at this point. Not a great year for housing stocks. Home builder stocks had a lackluster year when you look at the performance thus far. The open question for next year is what will happen to Mortgage Rates. The commentary coming through from caseshiller is that the data suggests potential home buyers dont need to be worried given where the fed is and where tenyear is trading. They make the point its the shortterm rate and not longterm rate thats moving with the Federal Reserve. Longterm rates is what Mortgage Rates track. So dont be worried about higher rates. Ending on an optimistic note. Pending home sales tomorrow and Consumer Confidence later this morning. Jobless claims as usual on thursday. All of which may be having an impact on the overall market which brings us to the road map which starts with the markets rally. S p 500 looking to regain that positive footing for the year. Energy recovering after yesterdays sell off. Also has the oil majors moving higher and the third wave of peak shipping season as consumers go to return holiday gifts. The ceo of u. P. S. Will join us in a few minutes. First futures solidly in the green moving higher. Stocks looking to rebound after yesterdays losses. And return the s p possibly to positive territory for the year. On the energy front, got to be watching crude oil. First thing in the morning. Crude oil is rebounding, back above the 37 barrel mark. Natural gas prices continuing to surge. Theyre up 29 since december 17th as the Weather Forecast has turned. With three session s left go in 2015, the nasdaq up. S p went slightly below negative territory yesterday, and the Dow Jones Industrial average down 1. 7 . Everything could change today. Yesterday was the lowest full day of volume weve had so far this year which is why energy comes front and center. You can get a decent trade on oil, and that bleeds through to the Energy Stocks. Whether that will be maintained as we go into the new year that bearishness, is an open question. If we close higher on the s p that will be four years in a row that the s p closed higher if we close lower, that will be the worst annual loss since 2008. We are marching into what could be the seventh year of the bull market come march. Either way we will not be moving much percentage wise. It has not been perhaps the year that many who follow the markets broadly and make predictions expected. The average strategist is up 8 in the equity markets. They were overly optimistic. If you bought the right stocks you did well. So many hedge funds dont seem to have done that. We talk often about the lack of performance from any hedge fund. They say we adjust for risk. Risk adjusted returns are important. Okay. We can accept that. One wonders whether that asset class in particular, which exceeded 3 trillion, will see significant redemocrat shunptio. A lackluster year for most hedge funds. Its worth pointing out the figures they played across the screen just now, how strong the gains have been during that sixyear period. The average return, if you include dividends for six years, is 18 . For just the past three years the average return per year has been 20 . Youre coming off what has been spectacular and historical terms, spectacular gains around the financial crisis, thats why you have this conversation about whether the fed pulled forward the gains and we didnt get this year. If youre a longterm investor you enjoyed that, even at the index level. I wonder if this ties into the hedge fund point. We didnt see spectacular returns in any asset class this year to simons point about the bull market, we have seen a rally of high yield bonds, of treasuries, of the stock market. You name it. Tech stocks, even the dollar we got this year and last year. Without a doubt. If you did it as a hedge fund, you can clearly go short. Those who succeeded did so in energy, not just the equities, but the commodity itself. To something you follow closely, in terms of Dollar Strength and Euro Weakness you came out on top. We got an 8 rally in the dollar this year. The last few weeks have been dominated with profit taking from that trade. Because the eu did not come through with even more that was part of it. That started it. The euro surged on that. The fed finally did increase Interest Rates and promised it would be slow from there. The next signal on the dollar, consensus on wall street is that it will continue to rise into 2016. We have to wait to see what the Federal Reserve tells us and what data shows us about that federal Interest Rate hike. For now the fed doesnt believe its own forecast of higher rates for the year. Has been a story for corporate america, those who have exports as key part of their business and international sales. They will always report currency adjusted, but the fact is margins keep coming in for many of those companies certainly, its a question for 2016 in terms of where the growth will come from. Lets leave it there for a moment. When we return, the ceo of u. P. S. , david abney will join us live. And looking at the futures, you can see were set up for a triple digit gain. The biggest event of the Holiday Season includes the huge surge in ecommerce, and all those questions as to whether the Delivery Networks can get the packages where they need to be in time. Joining us now from atlanta is david abney, ceo of u. P. S. , and Morgan Brennan is here at post nine to keep us connected to the fate of the industry through that season. Mr. Abney, good morning. How did you do in the end . Good morning. I think we did very well. We got all our deliveries completed by christmas eve. Thats a sign of success for us. Our success was led by what i call the three cs. First is collaboration, close collaboration we have with our customers in developing the forecast and making sure we had the operating plan that would handle their business. Second is control. Its not important how many packages you can enter into your system. Of course its important how many you can get successfully delivered. So working with our customers on a daytoday basis, and having the discipline to work with that operating plan. Then third is just the commitment of our people. You know we had over 500,000 people and a lot of them are longterm employees that have taken care of their customers for years and years. You take those three elements and it led to a successful season for us. Hi, mr. Abney. Just to follow up on that, in the beginning of the month we saw service drop a bit. Delays in some packages. What did you put in place to recover from that . You know, good question, morgan. Going into cyberweek, we had good plans. Then cyberweek and cybermonday, i would not say surge throughout the network, but in two or three primary locations we got much more volume than we originally thought. We recognized it need limit we deployed teams into those area, we did load shifting and changed our network around. And within a week, we had that problem reserved and were able to quickly restore into our 97 , 98 effectiveness as far as making service, which we were able to maintain throughout peak season. So we were really happy with the way our people responded to the challenge we received. Did you have to cap volume . I wouldnt say we capped volume, we agreed with customers on how much volume that they expected to be able to give us. And then through our control tower we worked on how to advance additional volume into the networks. We did a lot of weekend escalations. In fact, working for customers we were able to get so much volume moved into the weekend before christmas that we moved peak day from tuesday, 12 22 to monday, 12 21. Its that part of cooperation that made a difference this year. And talking about one of your customers specifically, amazon. Last week the wall street journal reporting that relation theres are tense . Are they tense . Is amazon in the process of becoming one of your competitor potentially . You know, amazon is a good customer of ours. We work closely with them. We really would not talk about customer relationships with any particular customer. We would talk to the customer directly. We feel that as long as we continue to invest in our business and add the value that we do with our global scale, with our scope of having customers from all Different Industries that peak at different times in our network, and then having our technology, that we add value and density that we dont see how any of our large retailers would be better off without us. David, i dont know if you got to twice your normal daily volume. You were planning to basically handle that give or take. Ecommerce in this country is still only 14 or 15 of total retail sales. And as that rises, it clearly has a disproportionate effect on your business for those peak 20 days. My question is really the degree to which the business can grow and deal with this at two times, two and a quarter times, two and a half times the normal daily volume. Or if you reach a point at which the organization cant stretch four that peak and still be what it is today. And whether you know what that point is yet. Simon, i would tell you you sure cant be my grandfathers u. P. S. And be able to deal with the ecommerce trends that were seeing. So its not only a peak issue, its we think ecommerce is a big challenge, it is a challenge for this generation of u. P. S. We have members that help us control the delivery of the ecommerce deliveries. We added 8,000 Access Points this year. So were really changing our business to be able to handle the added needs. Not going tell you its easy, but we feel like were adjusting accordingly. David, anybody who studied or tried to study what youre doing would have huge respect for the sheer scale, all of you, fedex and United StatesPostal Service for the sheer physics or physicality of what youre having deal with. My question is really as ecommerce grows, theres a brick wall beyond which it cannot grow or prices for delivery rise to such an extent that it challengeses the free delivery model and the free returns model. If that is why amazon is building out in the way it is because it knows that is the key to future success when others may not be able to cope. Do you a huge amount of work on this type of thing. What do you see five years down the load . We dont believe, simon, theres a brick wall. We believe that theres challenges, and thats why were working so hard to put in orion, our optimize dispatches in 70 of our driver routes this year. It will be 100 next year. Thats why were out mat ou aut buildings. We believe the key is density. So we feel like we are the most important ecommerce solution for etailors out there. Five years from now we feel like well be in that position. Mr. Abney, speaking of the future, morgan referenced that wall street journal story from last week. I would love to you respond to a quote from what they say were executives who say your hub and spoke system moving a package from shipper to hub to brown van to home is growing obsolete. How do you respond . First, when you talk about unnamed executives or former executives, our business has changed a lot. Anyone that is familiar with our Business Today knows that we have done such an incredible job of expediting the network, and taken barriers out and putting more flexibility in. I do not agree thats a concern. I believe were a growing, changing, very flexible company. And our customers, including retailers, gave us real good reports this year for peak, and we believe that will continue. David, last quarter you noted softness in the u. S. Economy and specifically you noted softness in manufacturing. Im wondering if you can elaborate a bit on what exactly youre seeing in the u. S. Economy and how that relates to the outlook for next year. Were really seeing the same thing. We said last time mixed views. When you looked at Consumer Spending, you get a little encouraged. We felt good about that. I think that showed during peak of this year. But then when you look at Industrial Production and the activity that the fed is driving, youre just not seeing the same growth. So it carried on into the Fourth Quarter as we thought. Going into the First Quarter of next year we really got to see if this increased customer Consumer Spending is that really going to start driving Industrial Production . Now with the strength of the dollar and some other factors were not seeing it but were hopeful to see it change come first of the year. One more question for you. Thats the fact that a lot of folks out there dont realize that u. P. S. Is one of the top customers for the freight Rail Industry in the country. With all of this consolidation chatter going on with certain railroads, how do you as a shipper see that . Are you concerned about it . You know, what were concerned about is making sure that the railroads continue to provide us the service that they certainly have over the last year or so. And if they can do that in the present structure or if theres a different structure due to consolidation, as long as we have flexibility, as long as we get that kind of service that were looking for, then we will deal with the companies that we need to deal with at that time. Its not something that were overly concerned about. Im secretly wondering if you have to work through christmas and now you get long holidays. Does th is that how it works . It worked like that one time. You could get through 12 24, take a couple weeks off. Now with returns, you know, returns will peak next week. And so, no. Youll see u. P. S. Working just about as hard for the next couple weeks, then well have some people that will be able to take some breathers. Returns a huge story in themselves. David, good to see you. David abney joining us there, the ceo of u. P. S. From atlanta and Morgan Brennan as well. All right. Here we go. Three trading days left in 2015. Up next, well talk to art cashin as we count you down to the opening bell. Looking at futures, strong early action with less than ten minutes left to go until the opening bell. This could take us back into the green for 2015 for the s p. A lot of the Financial Services industry watching where we open today. Can we turn the markets positively for the year and attract more money on to the stock market next year . The opening bell is minutes away. Sure, tv has evolved over the years. Its gotten squarer. Brighter. Bigger. Its gotten thinner. Even curvier. But whats next . For all binge watchers. Movie geeks. Sports freaks. X1 from xfinity will change the way you experience tv. Youre watching squawk on the street, live from the Financial Capital of the world. The opening bell will ring in about 2 1 2 minutes from now. Lets bring in art cashin director of floor operations from ubs, who yesterday shared the stunning statistic that years ending with 5 often end up on the s p. Dare we break the trend . We better not. That would be a sign of something. Dont know what it means. We look in good shape. Almost a universal rally going on this morning. Almost all equity markets are better whatever continent youre on. Things look up. It looks like the s p will open in a critical resistance area, the 2070 to 2075. They had trouble there before. You wouldnt like to be repelled at that point and closing negative on the year. What moves us at this point . Still largely crude . Yeah. I think as long as crude is behaving, you dont need it to rally. You need it not to be falling. Its style not a conviction move. It doesnt say at this stage, were rallying, were rallying into the new year, join us, which is very important for people at this juncture now. Doesnt look like it has a lot of conviction. As i said yesterday, its in the interest of Many Mutual Fund operators to see the market close up. Even if its only a few pennies because up in the headline is much better than down. That makes Mutual Fund Sales difficult. Since you like the historical stuff, got another one for you. Okay. Generally in president ial election years the markets go up, 76 of the time according to sam stovall, and the average move higher is 6 for the s p. Do you buy that one . As market history, yes. As a prediction for 2016 . Im not sure. The outlyer here is we have fringe candidates, like donald trump, bernie sanders. They have a sense of hope and stability, but so far this election doesnt look stable. Art, thank you. My pleasure. The opening bell about to be rung here at the new york stock exchange. A few more trading days left in the year. There it is. At the big board, bank of america and bryant park celebrating the bank of america winter village in bryant park. At the nasdaq, code of support foundation, providing services to veterans and their families. We have a broadly higher open here. Almost all of the s p opening in the green. Aside from that very small bottom right there that is in the red. As you saw, and as was referenced, europe is higher, asia higher. So we had a broad rally on Global Markets ahead of our own open this morning after a down day yesterday. And with a handful of days left, three days left, three tradi