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.

Hey gang, don’t forget the markets are closed on Monday for Martin Luther King day. No action until Tuesday.

	The S&P nudged right up there, but didn’t exactly bust through to new highs. Somehow, I get the feeling it will try again.
	When the brokers are doing this well, I can’t help but feel that somehow, somewhere, I’m getting screwed. And I probably am.
	Maybe the stock market will notice one day that the bond market is falling apart, and interest rates are cruising higher. But then again, who cares? Have you seen Apple’s new phone??

Charts courtesy of StockCharts.com

Aren’t we getting near the time when CNBC will tell us that it’s “Breaking News” when the Dow doesn’t set a new record high?

The market is trying pretty hard to convince us that the word “correction” has been removed from the dictionary, and that stocks are never going down again. Ever. And who knows? Maybe they’re not. Everybody but the utilities are having a grand time of it:

Why are the utilities struggling? Because bonds are struggling as well, and interest rates keep climbing. But the stock market doesn’t care. Yet.
6-month: 5.14%   2-yr: 4.88%   5-yr: 4.76%    10-yr: 4.77%    30-yr: 4.86%.

Market internals were positive, but volume pulled back a bit. Advances/declines were 12 to 7 on the NYSE and 3 to 2 on the Nasdaq, with up/down volume 13 to 7 on NYSE and nearly 7 to 3 on the Nasdaq. New highs/lows were 225/19 on the NYSE and 157/21 on the Nasdaq.

Nearly all of the groups were green, with the utilities (0.9%) leading a very short list of losers - mainly tech stocks, that pulled back slightly after a big week. Oil stocks (+3.1%) led the winners - they needed a break. Following them up were oil services (+2.7%), natural resources (+2.8%), gold and silver stocks (+2.3%), metals and mining (+2.2%), commodities (+1.7%), natural gas stocks (+1.6%), transportation (+1.3%), chemicals (+1.3%) and biotechs (+1.3%).

Energy prices finally found a floor, at least for a day. Crude oil bounced up more than a dollar to $52.99/barrel. Gasoline rose 3 cents to $1.43/gallon, and natural gas climbed about 30 cents to $6.60/mmBTU. The dollar index fell back to 85.03. Gold and silver took advantage of the dollar drop, with gold gaining 14 bucks to $626/ounce and silver having a big day, moving up to $12.78/ounce.

BMB Note: After six months of the market climbing straight up, you can’t help but feel that, some day, it will end. But then again, we’ve yet to see anything that hardly resembles more than a burp.

I don’t know. I stlll believe that someday, things are going to change, and ‘buying the dip’ will no longer work. And Joe Blow will keep trying, and he’ll get his head handed to him. But that’s obviously not where we are today.

The Nasdaq moved to new highs this week. The S&P tried like heck to move to new highs today, but didn’t really quite make it, and the Dow is still a few points off its intraday highs.

It’s all good.

This little grab from Yahoo’s main page seems to be tempting fate just a bit, doesn’t it?

A report says that Toyota may build up to 5 new manufacturing plants in North America over the next 10 years. Contrast that to the American car makers, who last I heard, are shutting down plants and trying to get workers to take buyouts and leave.

Hmm.

Some big news in the futures markets this morning, as the USDA lowered their estimates for the size of the corn and soybean crops.

On CNBC, they were talking to a guy who was saying that with the crop sizes and added corn demand from ethanol production, the environmentalists and “pheasant-hunters” might have to give up their hold on some of the land that’s been set aside, and it needs to be returned to production in order to keep prices down.

A bit of a positive surge out of the gate has subsided, leaving the indices, as well as the A/D lines, hovering right around the flat line. We’re seeing some bounces in the energies and gold stocks, but tech stocks are giving some back.

Bonds are trickling still lower, yields up. Energy prices are just above the UNCH mark. The dollar is pretty near flat, with gold and silver higher.

Lotsa stuff for traders to chew on this morning:

• A strong December retail sales number.
• Import prices higher than expected. But if they were really due to higher petroleum prices, one could expect that to moderate in the future as energy prices have come down.
• Some not-so-good news out of techland, with a warning from AMD, poor earnings from Samsung, and this SAP warning out yesterday that clipped the stock for 10%.