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.

Sure. BMB returns from vacation, and the market tanks. I’m trying to figure out what I did…

All in all, this was a pretty lousy performance. The only good news I can find is that volume was quite light. But the numbers were pretty ugly. The Dow Industrials fell 85 points (-0.8%) to 10461, the S&P 500 dropped 10 points (-0.8%) to 1181 and the Nasdaq lost 19 points (-1.0%) to 1999. The Russell 2000 lost 9 points (-1.5%) to 611, the Dow Transports got slammed for a 3.3% loss, the Utilities dropped 0.9% and bonds held pretty steady, with the 10-year Treasury yield at 4.48%.

Market internals were, well, pretty poor. Advances/declines came in at 9 to 22 on the NYSE and 9 to 20 on the Nasdaq. Up/down volume ran about 1 to 3 on both exchanges, and new highs/lows were 62/38 on the NYSE and 36/69 on the Nasdaq.

No winners to be found today. Steel stocks led the way down, falling 3.3%, followed by transports (-2.8%), oil services (-1.9%), natural gas (-1.9%), chemicals (-1.6%), airlines (-1.4%), oil stocks (-1.2%) and paper stocks (-1.2%).

Crude oil prices continued their slide today, dropping to $53.32/barrel, but apparently that wasn’t much of a help to the market. The dollar index fell 0.5%, and gold prices moved up to $426.50/ounce.

This market continues to struggle to get moving - in either direction.

A wrap-up of the first quarter’s non-action, as the guys from Platinum Capital Management ponder the effects of a stagflationary environment on the market.

But first, they get in a few shots at CNBC:

My one bright spot was watching a CNBC Roundtable all speculate on whether the jobs report would come in over or under the consensus estimates.

Each of the smiling little bulls bet on the “over” except, surprisingly, for perma bull Larry Kudlow who, when pressed by the little bulls, relented that the number would be only slightly under. When jobs came in at about HALF of the consensus, smug turned quickly to a big embarrassed ug. It was positively priceless.

Ah, those bullish fumes that so very often make the CNBC bubbleheads such wonderful contrarian indicators. Oil prices off the charts, interest rates moving inexorably up, inflation pressures building. No worries. Be happy at CNBC – cause bearish rhetoric makes for bad ratings – and besides, it’s not their money they are losing for you.

You’d think that CNBC would get tired of making themselves such an easy target.