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.

A dip in crude oil prices below $41/barrel wasn’t enough to move the markets higher today, as the three major indices all finished just slightly lower. The Dow lost 10 points to 10543, the Nasdaq dipped 1 point to 2128 and the S&P 500 dropped 1 point to 1188. The Russell 2000 managed to add 3 points to finish at 632, and the 10-year Treasury yield held fairly steady at 4.16%.

Market internals were pretty flat , with advances leading declines slightly on both exchanges, up volume/down volume was flat on the NYSE and slightly negative on the Nasdaq. The number of new highs bumped up a bit to 285, against only 28 new lows.

The only industry group to make a major move today was the housing stocks, which moved ahead by 3.1% in a continuation of yesterday’s move. The broker/dealers added 1%. On the down side, transportation stocks fell by 1.2% and gold stocks lost 0.9%.

It’s gotta be a dot com, doesn’t it? I mean, I thought TOL was a home builder — but they’re up another 5.6% today.

Closed at $54.11 on Wednesday, currently trading at $64.48. That’s more than 19% in less than two days’ trading. The rest of the homebuilders (BZH, HOV, KBH, etc.) are making similar whacko moves.

I know, they must’ve gotten some sort of deal with Sirius Satellite Radio - d’ya think?

Well, maybe a little. But just a little, not enough to be concerned about. Never mind that the Producer Price Index has risen 5% over the past year, the most since 1990.