Today’s attitude is a bit more fickle.

Online stock trading and online options trading have never been more challenging and more re-warding. Without today’s modern conveniences I’d be in the dark until I came home from work. Or maybe even later.

Instead of reading what happened in the paper the next day, just like the professional stock brokers, I can at least get nearly real time accounting of what’s going on.

Online stock trading is probably helping a lot of people sleep at night. Nothing is worse than not knowing.

As I expected, financial stocks are showing solid to the upside, but consumer driven stocks, like Microsoft are weak. This probably portends that everybody is looking ahead at a soft economy — a recession.

It would be surprising. Trillions of dollars have gone somewhere, and trillions are being spent by the public sector to make banks whole. The trillions lost and the trillions spent have to come from… us.

So, obviously, there will be a slow down in the economy.

Coke is down, too. And I just heard that Pepsi will be laying off people.

I took another look at the tech stocks. Amazon is down in a big way, 5.8%, and it joins Intel and Google and Oracle. Google is looking like a steal at $376 a share. I might load up.

The tech stocks that were up a bit at last check were Apple, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Ebay and Advanced Micro Devices.

It’s obvious on some of these tech stocks as to why they might be up. Ebay, especially. The question is, will their small rally last?

Next, I will take a look at Johnson & Johnson and see how they are fairing. Also 3M.

I’m just wondering if we are beginning to see doubt creep back into the markets. Not so much doubt now about the banks and financial companies, but doubts about what the consumer might do.

Most consumers are strapped. They have no options, being leveraged up to the hilt with credit card debt, home equity loans, car and student loans. There is no end to the consumer issues, and this probably won’t be a consumer led recovery in the recent sense of it.

The past couple of recessions have had the consumer step up, but now, with debt being so high and with so many feeling poorer with losses from their 401(k)’s and diminished housing, it is a real question of what the struggling consumer can do. If anything.

Now the markets might pause to look at that, if they think the banking crisis has been controlled.