Stocks closed mixed on Friday, but the Dow added to their winning streak making it 8 up days in a row. Stocks were also up solidly for the week, making it 3 up weeks in a row for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq, and 4 up weeks in a row for the Dow.

The April pullback has almost entirely been erased, and the big 3 indexes are within striking distance of their all-time highs, and are on the verge of breaking out to new highs.

A resilient economy, friendly enough statements from the Fed on interest rates, and a better than expected earnings season (with brighter outlooks for the ones to come), has lifted stocks back to near record territory. And it looks like there's a lot more upside to go.

While this earnings season is winding down, there's still plenty of companies that have yet to report with over 600 on deck this week.

In other news, Friday's Consumer Sentiment Index came in at 67.4 vs. last month's 77.2 and estimates for 77.0. The year-ahead inflation expectations (which is also a part of that report), rose to 3.5% from last month's 3.2% and views for the same.

We'll get another look at inflation this week with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) (retail inflation) on Tuesday 5/14. And then again on Wednesday 5/15 with the Producer Price Index (PPI) (wholesale inflation) report.

While nobody is worried about inflation getting back to the highs we saw 2 years ago, there are some concerns that inflation is beginning to creep back up. We'll see if that's the case, or if disinflation resumes its progress.

Last week, the U.K. announced that Q1 GDP grew by 0.6%, which means they have exited their brief recession after GDP fell -0.3% in Q4 of last year, and -0.1% in Q3.

This is good news for the world economy, and shows that growth is on the upswing, underscoring the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) recent outlook that raised their global growth forecast. (For the record, they gave the U.S. the biggest upside revision.)

And all this bodes well for the markets.

The economy and labor market continue to grow. But not at an overheated pace. Same goes for corporate sales and earnings.

And that suggests more market gains to come.

See you tomorrow,