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.

A price-weighted index can do funny things. At The Big Picture today, Barry’s got a nice table of the 30 Dow stocks, their all-time highs, the date they hit those highs, and their current percentage below those highs.

So as we see the Dow Industrials Average making new highs nearly every day recently, make note that:

• Only 4 of the Dow 30 have hit new highs in the month of November.
• Only 5 of the Dow 30 have hit new highs since mid-May.
• Only 7 of the Dow 30 have hit new highs in 2006.
• Only 9 of the Dow 30 are within 10% of their all-time highs.
• 15 of the 30 Dow stocks - half of them - are 30% or more below their all-time highs.

Food for thought. CNBC doesn’t usually tell you these things.

It would be silly to try to say that there is much wrong with these charts:

Energy stocks had the worst week of all, with a particularly bad day on Thursday, but the uptrend is still intact at this point. As for the Staples, they had a good week, but haven’t been making a lot of progress of late.

The health care stocks rebounded nicely from the post-election selloff.

The numbers as the market continues to move:

Charts courtesy of StockCharts.com