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.

Whew. Today was one of those days that should probably catch your attention. The action was pretty ugly, with a selloff on the Nasdaq on heavy volume of more than 2.67 billion shares. About the only good news was that volume was somewhat lighter on the NYSE., at 1.53 billion shares.

The Dow lost 106 points (-1.0%) to 10440, while the Nasdaq dropped 36 points (-1.7%) to 2115 and the S&P 500 fell 13 points (-1.1%) to 1177. The Russell 2000 suffered even more than the rest, dropping 12 points (-2.0%) to 627. Bonds got a boost as the markets stumbled, with the 10-year yield falling to 4.23%.

Market internals weren’t any better, with decliners leading advances by almost 3 to 1 on both exchanges. Down volume swamped up volume by more than 3 to 1 on the NYSE and by just under 2 to 1 on the Nasdaq. The number of new highs shrank to 255 vs. 55 new lows.

There was red across the board when it came to the industry groups. Taking the biggest hits were disk drives (-3.1%), biotechs (-2.4%), chemicals (-2.3%), natural gas (-2.3%), computer hardware (-2.3%), internets (-2.3%), oil services (-2.2%), semiconductors (-2.1%) and gold stocks (-2.1%).

Even falling oil prices couldn’t save the markets today: crude oil fell to $41.46/barrel, and gold prices fell as well, nearing $451/ounce.

Job cuts in November exceeded 100,000 for the third month in a row, first time since 2002.

Again. So much for a rebound. The $$ is now trading at $1.3446 against the Euro and $1.9476 against the Pound.

But don’t worry. It won’t be a problem. Oh, except for maybe those oil producers who have seen oil prices drop 20% from the top and are getting paid in dollars — dollars that are now worth 20% less than they were a few weeks ago…

In pre-market trading today, SIRI is up more than $.50 from yesterday’s close, to $8.65. That puts the company’s market cap between $10-11 billion, for a company with less than $50 million in revenues. The stock has doubled since mid-November, and quadrupled since mid-August.

What’s their P/E, you ask? Well, that’s a good question - they don’t actually make money. They lose it.