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.

Bill Fleckenstein has no love for Wall Street analysts. But come to think about it, BMB doesn’t either, and neither should you:

Wall Street continues to view stocks as one-way bets, with positive outcomes. Every day, I am more and more astounded by the bravado/denial that I see. If you told this crowd that the world was going to end on Friday, they’d be buying stocks in anticipation of the rebound they would expect to occur after its demise. How anyone can be sanguine about how this movie ends is beyond me.

As Gary Kaltbaum has been reminding his listeners every day: The next bear market may be just around the corner, and maybe it’s a ways off yet. But there will be another bear market someday, and you can be certain — when that time comes, you will get no help from Wall Street. So it’s up to you to recognize when that time is upon us, and take proper steps to protect yourself.

Notes on the latest moves in the industry groups, and since it’s the end of the quarter, it’s time to toss in the YTD numbers as well:

• A pretty split tape these days, with some areas still doing rather well, and many areas not doing well at all. The market, as a whole, is somewhat trapped at the moment, and is in a somewhat neutral state in the short term.
• If you’re going to be long: for now, it seems clear that these are the places to be: commodities, steel, natural resources, oil services, utilities. metals and mining, natural gas, oil, maybe telecom.
• Here are the areas to clearly avoid, until further notice: banks, disk drives, drugs, housing, transportation, airlines and brokers.
• For a more detailed breakdown of group movement over various time periods, try Prophet.net’s Industry Rankings page.