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.

Bill Fleckenstein would admit that he is not a big fan of Intel, and INTC’s latest earnings release hasn’t done much to change his opinion.

Intel doesn’t seem to have a lot of credibility where their numbers are concerned - Gary Kaltbaum also mentioned last week on his radio show that it looked to him as though Intel had written off some inventory.

From BMB’s point of view, investors need to get it through their heads that the PC boom is over, and it will never go back to the way it was — and companies like Intel and Microsoft will never again be the growth engines they once were. And all the talk about a PC “upgrade cycle” is a bunch of hogwash. Companies don’t just ‘upgrade’ their machines for the heck of it. They buy new machines as they need new machines. Not even the machines at the PC manufacturers themselves get upgraded. Trust me. I know. I was there.

Investors don’t seem to be particularly concerned about the chances of a market fall. Should they be more worried than they seemingly are? John Dickerson of Summit Global Management thinks they should be.

BMB doesn’t have any idea whether or not the economy or the markets are in danger - some say they are, and of course, some say they are not. No one can predict anything for certain. But I do believe every investor should at least be aware of the risks associated with their investments, and be prepared to act if things should take a turn for the worse.

Items of note on the latest industry moves:

• Energy stocks bouncing back as oil prices rebound.
• A divergence in health care, with hospitals doing well but drugs still struggling.
• Tech stocks continue to underperform.
• Airlines gave investors a head fake by outperforming late last year - now they pretty much stink.