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.

Xilinx ups its quarterly guidance:

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Xilinx Inc. (XLNX) said late Tuesday its quarterly sales will be higher than expected. In its mid-quarter update, the San Jose, Calif. chipmaker said its fiscal fourth-quarter sales will be 5 to 8 percent higher than the prior quarter, up from previous guidance of 1 percent to 5 percent growth. It left its forecast for gross margin and inventory level unchanged. Shares of Xilinx rose 2.3 percent to $32.19 in after-hours trading. The stock had closed down 1.4 percent at $31.46.

Mixed reports have been coming out of semiconductor land, some good, some not so good. The group is trying to push higher, but the strength doesn’t seem to be across the board. This report is obviously good news for Xilinx, and maybe for Altera as well, both makers of programmable logic devices.

If you couldn’t pay attention to the market today, don’t feel bad — you didn’t miss much. The market was stifled by higher oil prices and a weaker dollar today, and just didn’t get moving much in either direction, sliding a bit into the close. The Dow fell 24 points (-0.2%) to 10913 (ed: what, no 11000 today?), the S&P 500 lost 6 points (-0.5%) to 1219 and the Nasdaq tumbled 17 points (-0.8%) to 2074. The Russell 2000 also lost ground, losing 6 points (-0.9%) to 638. The Dow transports fell 0.1%, the utilities dropped 0.7%, and the bond market fell today as well, raising the 10-year Treasury yield to 4.39%.

Market internals looked much worse than the topline numbers did, the only good news being that volume was quite light on the Nasdaq’s drop. Advances trailed declines by just short of 1 to 2 on both exchanges. Up/down volume was worse, at 2 to 5 on the NYSE and just better than 1 to 3 on the Nasdaq. Not real pretty. New highs/lows looked pretty normal on the NYSE at 201/18, but weren’t real impressive on the Nasdaq at 98/59.

Not too many winners today, the exception being the gold & silver stocks which jumped 3.4%. On the down side, steel stocks took a big hit, falling 3.6%, followed by housing stocks (-1.9%), airlines (-1.4%), semiconductors (-1.4%), computer hardware (-1.3%), networkers (-1.2%), internets (-1.1%) and biotechs (-1.1%).

Crude oil prices moved above $55 for a short time again today, finishing up 70 cents on the day at $54.59. The dollar got slammed on the world’s currency markets, the dollar index falling 1.0%, and gold prices moved up above $440/ounce.

Today felt like the market was just stuck in the sludge all day. Internals were pretty gross, but volume was relatively light so today’s action really doesn’t provide much of a signal for the near term.

…or maybe ‘ramblings’ would be more appropriate.

A rather tepid day in the market so far. Oil prices are once again approaching the $55 level, the dollar has been under pressure this morning, pushing gold prices and gold stocks higher, and the bond market has been falling, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield back up to 4.39% from 4.30% yesterday.

And stocks are down slightly in all of this mess…

Look for strong stocks in strong groups. Go with the opportunities that put as many of the odds in your favor as possible.