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.

Not surprisingly, Bill Fleckenstein doesn’t understand - at all - why the market is doing what it’s doing right now:

I suspect that when the history books are written on this particular moment in time — and, for what it’s worth, right now “feels” to me like a cross between September 1987/early 2000 — people will look back and shake their heads in wonderment at how the market could have done what it did. Just as anyone would think, looking back to the autumn of 1973 or any other inflection point: Wow, how could market operators have been so blind?

Well, that’s what the madness of crowds is all about: always wrong at the inflection points but driving you nuts as you try to exploit the opportunity.

It is what it is.

Stocks that may be transitioning from low to high:

AKS AOC ARBA ATO CMC CMG GMXR JBHT MLM PALM RTI SHFL THO X

With names like CAAS and TASR starting to run again, it might be a sign that things are getting a little bit fluffy…

Stocks that may be transitioning from high to low:

ATRS BTI DDS EE HCR KO KR MCK NCX NGPS PEP SWY VAR WOOF

As always, not recommendations, just observations.

Items of note on the latest industry moves:

• A strong week for metals. The non-precious metals stocks have made particularly strong moves off their lows in the past week or two - take a look at the steels ($DJUSST chart) and the metals & mining ETF (XME chart).
• Health care has been a bit of a slacker, as the market has been giving up its defensive posture. Hospitals and HMOs continue to be the worst of the group.
• Also in the commodity area, energy stocks have come off their lows, though not quite as strongly as the metals. But the charts of the oil ($XOI chart) and natural gas ($XNG chart) stocks look like they’ve put in near-term lows.
• A little acceleration this week in the tech groups, like software ($GSO chart), semis ($SOX chart), and hardware ($HWI chart).
• Not a lot of weakness to be found right now. We’ll see how long this lasts.
• For a more detailed breakdown of group movement over various time periods, try Prophet.net’s Industry Rankings page.