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.

After the bell, lowered revenue forecasts from Altera, Xilinx.

Despite the recent drop in oil prices and dips in both utility and energy stocks, it doesn’t look like Bernie is ready to give up on either sector just yet.

The markets popped up in the morning and managed to hold modest gains throughout the day, on a day dominated by news on the dollar, gold and oil prices.

The Dow gained 53 points (+0.5%) to 10494, the Nasdaq added 11 points (+0.5%) to 2126 and the S&P 500 picked up 6 points (+0.5%) to 1183. The Russell 2000 also added 4.5 points to finish at 630, and the dollar bounce sent bond prices higher, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield down to 4.13%.

Market internals leaned slightly positive for the most part, but down volume beat out up volume on the Nasdaq by 3 to 2. Also, the number of new highs continues to contract, as there were only 152 new highs to 61 new lows.

Gold prices plummeted early today as the dollar strengthened, falling to below $435/ounce before recovering somewhat to near $440. Crude oil moved up slightly to just above $42/barrel.

Winners were led by biotechs (+2.4%), transportation stocks (+2.0%), disk drives (+1.7%) and health care (+1.6%). Gold stocks led the down side, recovering from being down more than 3% to finish down 1.5%. Semiconductors fell by 1.3%

Following up on yesterday’s post regarding SIRI: today, some of the ’silliness’ is getting wrung out, as the stock is getting whacked by more than 20%. With a little more than an hour to the close, SIRI is trading at $7.00, down $2.01 or more than 22%, on volume of more than 320 million shares.

The company that started it all back in the early ’80s is selling their PC business to a Chinese computer company.

Big bounce in the dollar overnight, big dip in the precious metals. Gold trading down $15 to around $438/ounce.

Update: Here’s more info on the dollar/gold moves.