The Market On Wednesday

  Good morning. It is 37 degrees and overcast here in the Upper Hudson Valley. It's the type of gray day that we get a lot of in this neck of the country. I suspect we had a dusting of snow last night but that has all melted. Allegedly it goes up to 50 degrees later on. Well I am all for completely trashing the Knicks, sell off the team and start over please. The team's present record is 4 wins and 15 losses. That is about as bad as it gets. Nothing is working as far as committed team play goes and the fans may soon revolt. Phil Jackson, get back to the drawing board dude, New York deserves a lot better than this mess. Sure, certain players are trying very hard - Anthony, Calderone, Stoudemire, and maybe rookie Travis Wear, otherwise, let it all go. What a disappointment.

  At 9:00 a.m. ET futures are flat and the price of oil per barrel is up. The market is poised to open in the flat area.

  The suspicion now is that OPEC is trying to kill off the Bakken reserve crude production by flooding the market with their lighter crude oil. Sounds likely, and in my opinion it's a good move. The less oil out there the better. In fact having no oil out there, well even better. ADP is saying the US created 208,000 new private sector jobs in November, which is below the expected 221,000. I would suspect a lot of these jobs are holiday related. On Friday we get the full government report on jobs in November, and that report is as you know, a political football.

CNN: Stocks: 4 things to know before the open

Oil prices were clawing back more ground -- rising about 1% to $67.40 a barrel in electronic trade -- after taking a beating following OPEC's decision not to cut production last week. That was seen as an attempt to choke off the U.S. shale boom.