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.

Fleckenstein says yes, it’s rare — but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

Jim Jubak tells you how you might beat the market indices in ‘05. Jubak might be worth listening to — he beat the market pretty handily in ‘04. Not bad for a CNBC guy…

New edition of the Chart Watchers Newsletter at StockCharts.com. You can check out John Murphy’s take on the first week’s action, some quick sentiment changes and current strength in the dollar.

Items of note on the latest industry moves:

• A lousy start to the year, with the best groups down more than one percent.
• The ‘worst’ list is now solidly in the red.
• Health care stocks held up pretty well, and the industry as a whole has been outperforming the rest of the market of late.
• Tech stocks have been weakening over the past 8 weeks.
• Airlines outperformed for a while - the past week gave a lot of that back.