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.

Bernie Schaeffer takes a look at the big-cap pharma names. Like Bernie says, most of them are to be avoided for now, with a few exceptions like JNJ.

I wonder why I bothered to get up today. Pretty dull day in the markets - not much movement in the indices, and light volume worthy of a hot summer day.

The Dow finished down 1 point at 10715, the S&P 500 dropped 1 point to 1202, and the Nasdaq fell 5 points to 2082. The Russell 2000 lost 1 point to 637, and the bond market held up keeping the 10-year Treasury yield at 4.06%.

Market internals were a little on the weak side: volume was extremely light, advances/declines were about even on the NYSE and 7 to 8 on the Nasdaq. Up/down volume was just short of even on the NYSE, but 2 to 3 on the Nasdaq. New highs were still strong, outnumbering new lows by 530 to 29.

The only group making a strong move up was the airlines, which gained 2.1%. The losers were led by gold&silver stocks (-2.7%), oil services (-1.8%) and paper stocks (-1.5%).

Crude oil prices fell $1.20 to $45.28/barrel, the US Dollar Index rose 0.8% and gold prices fell to $413/ounce.

The latest edition of the ChartWatchers newsletter from StockCharts.com is available for your viewing pleasure.

Here’s what you’ll find in this edition:

John Murphy kicks things off with a look at the market’s current Elliott Wave picture. Richard Rhodes is feeling bullish about technology stocks right now. Carl Swenlin shares the historic perspective for years that end in “5″. And Arthur Hill looks at the sector picture for the Nasdaq 100.

The weekly wrap of technicals and sentiment from Schaeffer’s. This week, there’s a hint of optimism sneaking back up as the indices are trying to hold their 50-day moving averages.