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.

Yes, it’s earnings season once again. Here’s a wrapup of the releases and reactions after the bell today. TI put in a good showing, but there were some clunkers too.

The market held its own today, not staging a strong recovery, but not giving in to a total collapse either. The Dow Industrials fell 16 points (-0.2%) to 10071, but the S&P 500 gained 3 points (+0.3%) to 1146 and the Nasdaq added 5 points (+0.3%) to 1913. The Russell 2000 got back 5 points (+0.8%) to 585, the Dow Transports stemmed their slide by gaining 0.7%, the Dow Utilities gained 0.6% and the bond market pulled back a bit, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield up to 4.27%.

Market internals leaned to the positive side. Volume was again somewhat strong, but did drop quite a bit from Friday’s big move. Advances/declines were 19/13 on the NYSE, but flat on the Nasdaq. Up/down volume looked better, at 3 to 2 on the NYSE and 10 to 7 on the Nasdaq. New highs/lows still look pretty poor, at 9/137 on the NYSE and 23/218 on the Nasdaq.

Steel stocks recovered all of their losses of Friday, moving higher by 4.8%. They were followed up by gold & silver stocks (+1.9%), housing (+1.7%), natural gas (+1.6%), oil (+1.5%), chemicals (+1.3%), oil services (+1.3%), retailers (+1.3%), banks (+1.3%), paper (+1.3%) and disk drives (+1.2%). Losers were led by the healthcare payors (-1.8%) and hospitals (-1.2%).

Crude oil prices fell slightly to $50.37/barrel, the dollar index fell 0.7%, and that sent gold prices higher to around $427/ounce.

I’m watching a live announcement from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Sirius Satellite Radio - without sound, of course. I mean, really.

So, apparently Sirius and Martha are doing some sort of content arrangement, and Martha will have her own channel on Sirius. Someone help me out here: why would anyone listen to anything having to do with Martha Stewart on the radio? I mean, isn’t cooking and style kind of a visual thing? Don’t you have to see what she’s talking about to get the idea? Even though I don’t watch her television show - and never have - it would seem to me that the whole concept is much better seen than simply heard.

I must be missing something here. Oh, and I guess you can add whatever payments Sirius will be making to MSO to their list of already humongous contracts that they simply do not have sufficient revenues to cover - like Howard Stern, the NFL, etc. They don’t have the money!

A look at current market sentiment and technicals. Sentiment continues to move to the negative side, as you might expect, but still hasn’t reached the extremes that may indicate an end to the slide.

• Following Wall Street’s lead, Asian markets sold off overnight, and European markets aren’t faring well either.
• Bank of America and 3M post earnings, helping to stablize the index futures pre-market.
• Adobe to acquire Macromedia. Merger mania continues.
• Crude oil prices dipped below $50 during overnight trading, now at $50.13.