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.

Taser International (TASR) was one of the hotly traded ‘cult’ stocks of 2004. Well, some potential competition in the stun gun business along with an SEC investigation into some reported sales has cut the shares in half in three days. Hope you weren’t the last one in.

Chart courtesy of StockCharts.com

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) stock made a nice run up off its lows from September to December. But if you’ve held the stock since the beginning of the year - or for even 6 months - today’s action put you right back where you started. This is why you have to keep your eyes on the stocks you’re holding, or use stop orders to protect your profits.

Chart courtesy of StockCharts.com

Intel reported earnings after the bell. Apparently, the market liked what it heard. INTC up 2.8% in the after-market.

The markets struggled right out of the gate today, reeling a bit from earnings and warning news, recovering only a bit from their worst levels. The Dow lost 65 points (-0.6%) to 10556, the S&P 500 dropped 7 points (-0.6%) to 1183 and the Nasdaq fell 17 points (-0.8%) to 2079. The Russell 2000 fared no better, falling 6 points (-1.0%) to 611, and the bond market rallied, pushing the 10-yaer yield down to 4.24%.

Market internals were pretty ugly again, with advances/declines running 3 to 5 on the NYSE and 3 to 7 on the Nasdaq,. Up/down volume was even worse, at 3 to 7 on the NYSE and 1 to 4 on the Nasdaq. Those numbers are not good, folks. There were 99 new highs to 56 new lows.

Semiconductors bore the brunt of the hit today after AMD’s warning, falling 2.5%. Following them down were networking stocks (-1.8%), computer hardware (-1.6%), and biotechs (-1.6%). Gold & silver stocks were one of the few groups making gains today, moving up by 0.9%.

Crude oil moved slightly higher to $45.68/barrel, the dollar slipped a bit again, and gold prices held around $422/ounce.

AMD warns on revenues from flash memory. Hmm, it wasn’t that long ago when BMB was questioning the run-up in AMD’s stock, was it now?

This comes with Intel’s earnings report due up today. AMD reports earnings on the 18th.