Updated quantity ratings on 88 stocks

This week, I’m reminded of the classic 1980 comedy movie “Airplane!”, which is a spoof of the disaster movies that came out in the 70s.

When the passengers and crew of an airliner come down with food poisoning, a rogue war veteran pilot is forced to take control of the plane and land it. As the situation goes from bad to worse, there is a guy who is supposed to help manage the situation in the control tower. When he takes over, he utters the line “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking,” then lights a cigarette.

In what becomes a running joke throughout the film, the nasty habits he “gives up” get progressively worse… “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking” and he has a drink and then further…

I bring this up because this could be “one of those weeks” in the stock market.

For starters, the market woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning after the long holiday weekend. The S&P 500 finished 2.1 percent lower today, while the Dow fell about 600 points, or about 1.5 percent. But the NASDAQ fared the worst, losing nearly 3.3%.

Well, welcome to September, folks.

I know you might be hoping that with the long Labor Day weekend marking the unofficial end of summer, the ruckus we’ve had in the market recently is also in the rearview mirror. Unfortunately, this may not be the case yet.

As we discussed recently, the reality is that with much of Wall Street still on vacation, volume is light and that tends to make September a bad month for stocks.

Consider the last four Septembers: The S&P 500 is down 3.9%, 4.8%, 9.3% and 4.9%, respectively. And this is not a recent trend either. It’s the worst month for stocks going back to 1950. So we could be headed for another choppy month.

But it’s not just seasonality and low volume that are driving inventories down. So, in today’s 360 Squarewe’ll talk about what else is on the minds of investors weighing in on the market right now. Then I’ll share with you some reasons why you shouldn’t get too discouraged for the coming month.