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.

Fleckenstein says we can look at what happened in Japan to get an idea of what we’re in for if when the housing bubble finally bursts.

If you’re looking for a charting site that can help you easily and quickly identify where the strength and weakness is in the market, I highly recommend you sign up for a basic (i.e., FREE!) membership at Prophet.Net. If you sign up for the basic membership, you can track your portfolio there and such things, as well as save your preferred settings for their mini-charts, etc.

Here are my favorite sections at the site, and the main reasons why I use it:

• Chart Surfer - this area of the site breaks down the market into all the various sectors and sub-sectors, and you can easily browse the entire market in just a few minutes by clinking on the various sector names on the left-side navigation panel. If you click on a major sector, you get a page with charts of all the sub-sectors in that area, and then you can click on the sub-sectors to see charts of all the stocks in the group on a single page or a few pages, depending on the size of the group. If you’ve signed up, you can change the mini-chart setup and save your preferences. Also in the Chart Surfer, you can surf with the ‘jump to symbol’ feature. Enter a stock symbol in the dialog box, and up comes a page (or pages) of the sub-sector that stock is in with its chart and charts of all of the other stocks in the group. Pretty cool.
• Industry Rankings - you can look at the performance rankings of all the various groups over your time period of choice, from 2 days to 5 years. Once you’ve found the strongest or weakest groups, you can click the ‘charts’ link to view all the charts in the group. Very nice.

You know me. Always trying to help. I can’t do all of your homework for you, but I will try to help you find ways to do it better!

Items of note on the latest industry moves:

• Health care groups dominating the ‘best’ list over the 4 and 8 week period.
• Some green on the ‘worst’ list for this week. That’s somewhat encouraging.
• As we saw in the sector wrapup yesterday, some of this week’s better performers were groups that have been beaten down over the last few weeks.