Bear Mountain Bull

It’s time again for a little BMB R&R, especially with the market behaving as bizarrely as it’s been. Maybe if we stop watching it start to behave a little better…

Posting will be very light and variable over the course of this week, but we’ll put up an open thread each market day for our readers to comment on the day’s market activity or to post any interesting links they might run across.

Check the space below for whatever the latest might be during this ‘off’ time, and please visit the various sites in the ‘Links’ and ‘Regular Stops’ for up-to-date market news and analysis.

BMB will be back in full swing by next weekend.

Has anyone else noticed that the rallies we’ve had this year have been right around earnings season?
Bernie has.

Hope you didn’t get caught holding this stock.

A dip in the price of crude oil helped bring the markets out of a morning hole, and all three major indices managed gains on the day. The big winner was the Nasdaq, which gained 25 points, or 1.3%, while the Dow and S&P gained 0.2% and 0.5% respectively. Volume was a little on the light side, advances/declines ran about 5 to 4, and new highs outnumbered new lows by about 2 to 1.

Leading groups were internet stocks, biotechs and computer hardware, all gaining more than 2%. Laggards were again the former leaders, those being gold, oil, oil services and commodities.

Big name earnings after the bell: IBM and Texas Instruments.

New edition of the bi-weekly publication from StockCharts.com.

…with a good dose of technical and sentiment analysis from Schaeffer’s.

Some not-so-great news from 3M and Mattel.

For those holding or thinking of buying Intel stock, Fleckenstein’s latest column is required reading. Oh yeah, and the rest of you should probably read it too. And in case you haven’t looked, Intel stock is trading at the same levels it first reached in 1997.