The earnings stink. Earnings are down 16 percent, multiples are sky high, and the whole world is built on hope and a lot of cash flow.

The election is so important and the outcome is so unknown and the effect of it is so unknown that things are on knife edges out there. I know somebody will benefit but I just don't know who.

Cisco is the 800-pound gorilla of technology nowadays. People are reasonably confident that it ought to be a pretty good number and that has set the tone for the tech group as a whole. More than half of the Dow's gains are in technology stocks.

Cisco reports tomorrow (Tuesday) and Cisco is the 800-pound gorilla of technology nowadays. People are reasonably confident that it ought to be a pretty good number and that has set the tone for the tech group as a whole. More than half of the Dow's gains are in technology stocks.

The Fed made it reasonably clear they will raise rates again. The Fed is impacting the Dow stocks and not impacting the Nasdaq stocks.

Everyone is waiting to see if the Fed does anything, and if it doesn't, what it says about the economy over the rest of the year.

Absent bad news, the market wants to go up. There's a lot of money around and a lot of hope around.

They're heavily into the insurance business, but in a very interesting way, in terms of an arbitrage between the buyers and sellers. They don't take an awful lot of insurance risks for themselves and they've been able to demonstrate the ability to make money in both soft markets and hard markets for insurance premiums.

The big risk with the stocks that have done well recently is that the economy is so strong that it can't continue, and when it slows down, that will hurt earnings. Secondly, when the Fed finally acts to slow the economy and bring down inflation, it will be a double-whammy to earnings - and it will be an extra big whammy to those stocks that have been in the situation where they really need strong earnings growth going forward.

Once we get past the CPI, we'll be right into Fed watch. Just because the numbers report a slower economy doesn't' mean that we're looking at anything more than the natural seasonal response.