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 update to our post from a few days ago (“Put/Call Ratio Turning”):

Today’s CBOE equity put/call ratio of 0.763 is the highest reading since November 1st. The 21-day MA now appears to have put in a bottom along with the 10-day. You can check out how low this trough in the ratio is from a historical perspective by looking at the chart on the bottom of this page at VTO Report.com.

Here’s the latest chart of the moving averages:

The markets started down this morning on various pieces of bad news, but picked themselves up by late morning and started moving upward, finishing near the highs of the day.

The Dow finished higher by 59 points (+0.6%) at 10553, the Nasdaq climbed 3 points (+0.1%) to 2129 and the S&P 500 gained 6 points (+0.5%) to 1189. The small-cap Russell 2000 dipped less than 2 points to 629, and the bond market sent the 10-year yield up to 4.16%.

Internals were stronger on the NYSE, where advances led declines slightly and up volume outdid down volume by almost 3 to 2. Things were a little different on the Nasdaq, with declines beating out advances by 11 to 8, and down volume just slightly larger than up volume. The number of new highs stayed relatively low at 230. while the number of new lows snuck up to 73.

Housing stocks got a boost from Toll Brothers’ earnings report, and finished up 3.2%. They were followed to the upside by oil services (+1.9%) and biotechs (+1.3%). Losers on the day were led by semiconductors (-1.5%) and disk drives (-1.0%).

A look at the weekly chart for crude oil shows that the uptrend from the lows of last spring has clearly been interrupted — the 20-week moving average that had served to support the move up has been violated. For now, it looks like there is support here in the low 40s, this being the region of the May/June peaks and the late August lows.

Chart courtesy of StockCharts.com

Initial jobless claims rose slightly last week. That news, combined with last night’s semiconductor warnings and concerns over oil prices are pushing the market down today. At this point (12:25 ET), advance/declines are looking pretty ugly at about 1:2.