Financials and FED helped stock markets.

Stock markets have rebounded this short trading week. Fortunately Black Monday stayed only with Bear Stearns and the fear hasn't been spread all over. FED cut by 75 bp below street expectation but it has been taken as a good step. Gold and crude oil stepped down from record prices and US dollar bounced from bottom.

Let's have a look to broadly expected earnings results for brokerages.

Both Lehman Bros and Goldman Sachs reported this week significant profit decline, 57% down respectively 53%. Even thought they beat estimates which returns faith in financial sector. As well as Morgan Stanley on Wednesday with decline 42% (top analyst estimates). After Bear Stearn collapse there were a lot of fear about earnings this week. Nevertheless the most risky is seen result of Merrill Lynch. This company has more than 30 bln USD in risky loans. Also liquidity ratio is the lowest (52%) among financials. The best liquidity has Lehman Brothers with 74%.

Related tickers: (SPY), (DIA), (QQQQ), (BSC), (MS), (GS), (LEH), (GLD), (OIL), (USO),

Bear market started and finished by Bear Stearns?

Bear Stearns came last summer as a first on surface with problems related to risky loans. In fact issues with Bear's hedge funds have started credit market turmoil. And these days this company is just history, traded for fraction of its price one year ago.
Today company has earnings call. Also other big brokerages are releasing results this week like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley. What is interesting that up to now Bear Stearns hasn't declared such a huge writedowns as e.g. Merryll Lynch did.

(see total writedowns due to subprime...)

After this I am bit afraid from numbers coming this week. Of course someone can say BSC doesn't have such a diversification like others but still who would expect one week ago this collapse for one of the biggest financial company.

Related tickers: (BSC), (GS), (LEH), (MS), (XLF), (IYF),