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 analysis of the current situation in interest rates, the housing market, stocks and the dollar from Mike Hartman at Financial Sense Online.

Not quite as ugly as the past couple of days, but it wasn’t exactly pretty either. The Dow fell another 33 points (-0.3%) to 10598, the S&P 500 dropped 4 points (-0.4%) to 1184 and the Nasdaq had the worst day again, losing 16 points (-0.8%) to 2091. The Russell 2000 had another bad day dropping 11 points (-1.8%) to 617, and Treasuries rebounded slightly with the 10-year yield finishing at 4.28%.

Market internals were weak all day and got worse in the last hour of trading, with decliners outpacing advancers by more than 2 to 1. Up/down volume was also negative running nearly 1 to 3. There were only 71 new highs and 35 new lows.

I did find one group that was up on the day, as paper stocks managed a 0.3% gain. The rest were red, although the damage wasn’t quite as heavy as the last two days. Leading the way down again were the airlines, falling 5.8%. Other losers were REITs (-3.8%), semiconductors (-1.5%), chemicals (-1.5%) and housing stocks (-1.1%).

Crude oil fell a half-dollar to $43.39/barrel. The dollar held steady as did gold prices at just above $426/ounce.

Airlines shares are getting hammered for a second day, with Delta’s announcement of fare cuts prompting fears of lower revenue generation throughout the industry.

The AMEX Airline Index (XAL, chart) is down more than 5%, with many of the individual stocks faring worse than that.

Last night on his radio show Gary Kaltbaum gave a very simple, but very useful piece of advice on timing your entry into stocks:

“Very important: when you’re buying a stock, buy on a breakout or a pullback to support. When you’re shorting a stock, buy the breakdown or a bounce into resistance.”

Simple to say, not all that easy to execute. But we keep trying…

Xilinx warns. That will offset LSI’s good news from last night.

XLNX down $1.30 in pre-market.

Apparently Circuit City shoppers weren’t in much of a holiday mood. The stores must’ve been out of IPods.