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.

North Korea claims to have conducted a nuclear test. Can we believe them? Certainly, external monitors would detect such a test and provide proof. We’ll have to wait to see if there is any…

Tonight, Bill Fleckenstein is pretty amazed by the reception for the antics of RIMM and the excitement over the new high on the Dow.

C’mon, you didn’t expect him to turn bullish, did you?

You knew that the recent drop in oil prices wouldn’t be welcomed by everybody. OPEC intends to cut supplies by a million BPD.

Items of note on the latest industry moves:

• The ‘worst’ list is still dominated by energy and commodiites, while the ‘best’ list is a hodgepodge of retail, transportation, brokers and tech - with the semiconductors conspicuous in their absence.
• Most of the groups have pretty decent looking charts at this point. Of course, the energies and commodities do not. In addition to those, the hospitals are a bit of a mess, HMOs are flat, and housing is in a very weak looking uptrend.
• In the energies, might we have seen some bottoming in the oil ($XOI chart) and natural gas stocks ($XNG chart)?
• For a more detailed breakdown of group movement over various time periods, try Prophet.net’s Industry Rankings page.