Morning Bid with David Gaffen

This seems like a day best fit for Mad Magazine-style descriptions of what we’re about to see in the equity market. Suffice to say that in the past, the weak trend evinced in the quarterly stats for earnings growth were often restored to some sort of level people could live with once Apple figures were released.

The big Megillah of the market is out after the close, so naturally there will be a ton of scrutiny – and a ton of trading – surrounding Apple after the consumer electronics giant reports results and gives people an idea of how its signature iPhone and newcomer iWatch products are doing.

IBM, long-time stalwart of the Dow industrials, reports quarterly results after the close, the first of several major technology bellwethers to release its earnings figures. The stock has been a laggard compared with the benchmark S&P 500 over the last year or so, with the S&P’s greater-than-10-percent return easily dwarfing the losses from IBM in that time.

The next bellwether on the earnings docket is Google, with the hope that it should exceed expectations, but the stock has been in a steadily declining pattern of lower highs and lower lows since it hit its peak in early 2014.

The Federal Reserve is the early concern on the part of investors – Janet Yellen’s testimony is out in the morning when she appears before the combative House of Representatives, though her speech on Friday highlighting her concerns about ongoing slack in the labor market and the possibility that international issues may undermine the Fed’s plans fed the bearish case when it comes to rate increases.

If history repeats itself, first as tragedy, next as farce, the third time is probably “Greece.” The austerity measures to be implemented and the staggering bailout sum together mark another exhibit in the long history of evidence supporting the line about insanity being the thing someone does over and over while expecting a different result. In its most ruthless terms, though, the markets liked it on Monday, the stock market was higher, the Treasury market sold off, and we’re in a kick-the-can scenario that David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors a few weeks ago said would be viewed well because markets like can-kicking. It’s possible it gives investment managers the hope that they’ve found the fountain of youth or something.

The desire for the weekend would normally be among the motivating factors for hoping for a quiet day on Friday, particularly after the week the markets have endured – China continuing to melt down, Greece getting ready to go down the rabbit hole, the NYSE experiencing a three-hour halt as a result of a software update – if only the weekend didn’t pose its own special danger. And before that, Janet Yellen stands in the way too, so the relief won’t come for investors until that’s done.

One lesson the Chinese have figured out in the last few days, and the same goes for whatever squirrel chewed through the wires at the NYSE to cause a three-hour trading halt, is that markets can’t go down when they’re closed.

As the overnight session reveals, the true measure of the efforts by Chinese authorities to backstop their equity market was able to be seen in the performance of U.S.-traded shares of Chinese companies, particularly the small-cap names.

Dionysus the Elder, ruler of Greek city-state Syracuse in the fourth century B.C., was one of the first to devalue currency by turning one drachma into two drachmas by decree when he got into trouble through excessive spending.