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.

What if they held a housing auction, but nobody bought?

The number of people attending Saturday’s housing auction at the Doubletree Grand Key Resort was high, but unfortunately for the 22 property sellers, most of the bids were not.

Before the start of the auction, Slokumb had estimated 100 people would attend the event, but more than 200 showed up, with 58 registering to bid. Many chose to hang on to their bidding cards, and those who did bid were cautious. Absent were “bidding wars” with people vying back and forth for the highest bid while the price climbs higher and higher. Instead, most were content to let the property go to someone else for a lesser “bargain.”

None of the asking prices were met. The closest bid fell $149,000 short, while bidding on the most expensive property, located at South St., fell more than $2.5 million shy of the almost $6 million asking price.

Read the whole thing. I told you this housing market can’t be unwound without some pain.

A new issue of the ChartWatchers newsletter from StockCharts.com is available. The topics of discussion this time around include energy stocks, the Nasdaq/S&P ratio from a longer term perspective, the latest move in gold, the bearish look to the SMH and divergences involving MACD.

Have at it. While you’re there, go ahead and sign up to have the next ChartWatchers delivered to your inbox.

Have we seen an important bottom in oil prices? Note the pickup in volume on USO as the ETF hit new lows and bounced this past week.

Chart courtesy of StockCharts.com

Items of note on the latest industry moves:

• Energy and metals starting to take over the top spots.
• Hospitals, HMO, paper stocks are a mess. I’d stay away.
• Are the REITs finally topping here? Biggest move down in quite some time this week ($DJR chart).
• As we noted during the week, some slight signs of stress in the banks ($BKX chart) and the retailers ($RLX chart).
• Food and beverage stocks also had a rough week, in looking at the chart of the PowerShares ETF (PBJ chart).
• For a more detailed breakdown of group movement over various time periods, try Prophet.net’s Industry Rankings page.