Home sales, earnings reports, bad car companies, and the latest from SCOTUS. Financial Review by Sinclair Noe for 04-20-2016 DOW + 42 = 18,096 SPX + 1 = 2102 NAS + 7 = 4948 10 Y + .07 = 1.85% OIL + 1.43 = 43.90 GOLD – 6.00 = 1245.30 The S&P 500 hit an intraday high of 2111.05 today, less than 2% away from the 2134 all-time high, last May.   Purchases of previously owned U.S. homes rose more than projected in March. The National Association of Realtors reports contract closings climbed 5.1 percent to a 5.33 million annualized rate from February’s 5.07 million. The median price of an existing home rose 5.7 percent from March 2015 to reach $222,700. The median time a home was on the market decreased to 47 days from 52 days a year earlier. Meanwhile RealtyTrac reports Americans who sold homes in March realized the highest price gains since December 2007. On average, homeowners sold for $30,500 more than their purchase price, an average 17% price gain.   China’s Shanghai Composite Index fell the most in almost two months, closing 2.3 percent lower, having fallen as much as 4.5 percent during the trading session, with no obvious news driving the decline. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index was little changed, with small gains in Japan where the Topix index closed 0.2 percent higher.   Japan had its biggest surplus in more than 5 years. Japan announced a trade surplus of 755 billion yen in March, the largest since October 2010. However, ...