The whole story this week was about maintaining and improving confidence ? from the Fed and from Wall Street corporations. There's an implicit belief that we have seen a good deal of the worst and Wall Street is still being ultra cautious.

The whole story this week has been about boosting and maintaining confidence.

These are low consumer confidence numbers, more than likely affected by the hurricanes and high prices of energy.

1996 also saw a huge expansion of the Internet, with many major corporations, afraid of being left behind, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop World Wide Web sites in a frantic scramble to reach the vast new consumer market of Web use

A lot hinges on the numbers. If they're good, the market rallies. If we get any suspicious numbers, or more accounting-related stories coming into the fray, we're looking at lower prices again. It's a time of caution and some confusion.

Profit taking will be key words today (Thursday) and over the next couple of weeks. The Fed's rate cut yesterday bodes well for the longer term but near term it is an excuse to take profits. Cisco's story is another excuse to take profits in technology.