Financials and Techs face rough day

Financial stocks will give back some of their recent gains today and tech stocks will continue on a punishing trend. With the financials that's a certainty for the morning as American Express disappointed and raised consumer credit concerns, or maybe poured kerosene on an already steady brush fire is a better way of putting it. With Wachovia and Wamu reporting there's the distinct possibility of large "just one more time" losses that will aggravate the situation. If by any chance either of these firms report lower losses than expected that could be some offset, and the guess here is that Wachovia has some chance of doing that and Wamu none.

For techs, any earnings miss, competitive challenge, or less than inspiring guidance gets clobbered and Apple's guidance and Texas Instrument's quarter will punish a Nasdaq that is already reeling from Google's nonchalant attitude about its performance. This could be ugly.

But that's the morning. The traders have so much going on and global markets have so many components that you can say at the moment, "there's always the afternoon".