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 wrapup of earnings reports and activity after the bell.

Gary Kaltbaum sums up the current market situation rather succinctly:

So, regardless of which way the things turn out, keep in mind it is going to get tougher. We are now past the point where you will be bailed out of mistakes and past the time where “everything” works.

The markets started lower this morning, but managed another slight bounce in the positive direction today, healthy from a breadth perspective but not thoroughly convincing from a volume perspective. Could be that investors are waiting for the earning flood of the next couple of weeks before committing themselves.

The Dow finished higher by 71 points (+0.7%) at 10629, the S&P 500 moved up by 11 points (+1.0%) to 1196 and the Nasdaq added 18 points (+0.9%) to 2106. The small-cap Russell 2000 also gained 7 points (+1.2%) to 625, and the 10-year Treasury yield finished at 4.19%.

Market internals were decidedly positive with advance/declines just less than 2 to 1 on both exchanges, and up/down volume just less than 3 to 1 on the NYSE and 2 to 1 on the Nasdaq. There were 263 new highs to 46 new lows.

Nearly all groups moved to the upside, led by disk drives (+2.3%), broker/dealers (+1.8%), banks (+1.7%), computer hardware (+1.6%) and biotechs (+1.4%). Paper stocks were one of the only groups to be down, losing 1.2%.

Crude oil had traded above $49/barrel overnight, but finished the day session at $48.38. The dollar moved slightly higher today and gold prices held pretty steady at $422.50/ounce.

A day late, on Tuesday. Start the week with Schaeffers’ look at current market sentiment.