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.

In his column this week, Bill Fleckenstein notes a few specifics from AMD’s lawsuit against Intel.

On the subject of coercion, I thought that a comment by Mike Capellas, former CEO of Compaq, was quite potent. Capellas said he “had a gun to his head” when he told an AMD executive that he had to stop buying its processors, the suit says.

Pretty nasty stuff, if true. Now we know why companies like Dell don’t use AMD processors, don’t we?

In the article, Fleck provides a link to the full text of the AMD suit. Might be worth checking out.

	The Nasdaq Composite finally reached a six-month high on Friday (though it is still down YTD, due the large drop the first few days of January), but these new highs aren’t a result of performance in large-cap stocks.
	Looking at the other major indices, made up only of large-cap stocks, we see that the six-month high in the Nasdaq has yet to be confirmed by the S&P 500…
	…and we’re not even close to six-month highs in the Dow 30 Industrials.
	Not even the Nasdaq’s own Nasdaq 100 have matched the Composite index.
	The continued outperformance of the small and mid-cap stocks is seen clearly by looking at ratios of the S&P Small-Cap 600 and Mid-Cap 400 indices to the S&P 500 large cap index. These charts, where a rising line indicates outperformance by the smaller stocks, show that both small and mid-cap stocks have done much better than the large-caps since the spring of 2003, and aren’t showing any signs of slowing down.

Charts courtesy of StockCharts.com

Items of note on the latest industry moves:

• Most groups had a good week, with only one group in the red.
• Biotechs, housing stocks, broker/dealers, energy stocks still strong.
• Healthcare payors (HMOs) remain the only strength in health care.
• Some pretty big numbers starting to show up over 4 and 8 weeks. You gotta wonder how much longer the market can put up numbers like these.