Investors had to decide this (Monday) morning whether last week's rally was real or just a knee-jerk reaction to the previous week's losses.

It seems to me that this is a market where fundamental analysis has fallen flat. If you're looking for higher quality companies whose fundamentals are on the mend, you're not catching this market.

I think that the IBM numbers in particular are going to be important. The chatter that I hear is that Microsoft should beat, but IBM is more mixed. So if IBM beats, that might drive the market higher.

There's a general concern about the economy and corporate profits, ... The deals seem to be driven by the ability to reduce costs or create greater synergies of scale, so it's not something that's going to help them meet next quarter's earnings.

Everyone has talked about employment being the missing link in the recovery, but as the weekly jobless claims have made clear for some time, employment is moving in the right direction, it's just moving very slowly. At whatever point a substantial recovery in jobs really takes hold, that's probably going to be a difficult time for the stock market.

I think it's extremely important for U.S. investors to get this idea. It's slowly becoming more mainstream. As the world has become more global, it's more important to get best-in-class, and the only way you'll do that is to compare companies globally.