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.

An interview with a “corporate fraud buster” that specializes in short selling of “grossly overvalued” securities.

Every now and then, we’re lucky enough to see one of Gary Kaltbaum’s Trading Markets columns on Yahoo. Here’s a good one from this morning, reiterating some of the things that have been said here on BMB.

And don’t forget to check out Gary’s radio show whenever you get the chance.

The markets took a rest today as volume tapered off, as did index movement. The Dow and Nasdaq finished virtually unchanged, the S&P 500 lost just over a point (-0.1%) and the Russell 2000 fell 2.5 points or 0.4%.

Advance/decline numbers fell to the negative side, running 3:7 on the NYSE and 7:8 on the Nasdaq. Up volume/down volume was slightly negative on the NYSE but slightly positive on the Nasdaq. New highs continued to outnumber new lows, today by more than 10 to 1.

None of the industry groups managed to gain more than 1% today: the best group was the utilities with a 0.9% gain. Losing groups were oil services (-2.9%), broker/dealers (down 1.8% on news of investigations into bad customer order executions), oil (-1.4%), natural gas (-1.3%) and biotechs (-1.0%).

Events this week include earnings reports from Cisco (Tues.) and Dell (Thurs.) and the FOMC meeting on Wednesday, where a Fed funds rate increase seems likely.

A look at the dollar’s overbought/oversold levels from a historical perspective.

A look at the current technicals and sentiment, post-election version.

Fleckenstein: “neither party will be able to solve the economic problems that we face.”

Browse through the latest issue from StockCharts.com.