March 31

I want to be bullish. I terribly want to believe with rational cause that everything is going to be fine and the markets will see new highs soon, or at the very least that some decent and important sectors will. Much to my displeasure though, I cant say that with a straight face. We had a nice follow through day on the 20th with high volume and nice price action in all major indexes. That would be the good news I suppose. The bad news is that there where very few strong stocks that actually partook in that rally, new names breaking out of bases that could provide us with leadership and the like. Worse still it's only taken 4 days for a negative distribution day on heavy volume to occur after the follow through day to the upside. Important sectors such as the financials continue to look rather putrid, and the same could be said of retailers, semicondutors and utilities. Even the Agriculture related groups are starting to show some signs of strain. Not exactly the pretty picture you'd have in mind for the market to be showing right after a follow through day to the upside off a bottom. And, did I mention I really wanted to be bullish?
Because I wanted to be bullish I decided to look at a lot of stocks this weekend, hoping I could find some gem hidden someplace that had so far escaped my eye. No dice! I looked at the 2887 most heavily traded issues on the NYSE, Nasdaq and AMEX (yes all of them) before I gave up in in disgust. For all the looking I did, I was able to find exactly nine, yep you read it correctly NINE stocks that I thought had decent charts and management, enough so that if maybe the market would cooperate I'd be willing to put some of my own and my clients hard earned money into them. On the other hand, I had three pages worth of stocks that looked mighty fine to short, forty four that look excellent. Steel stocks and some oil companies look good (some oil companies also look terrible though). Horay for the incredibly shrinking dollar?!?!
So, where do we go from here? I dunno, a bar with good drinks maybe? About the only good thing I can think of to say about Friday was that the volume was the lowest of the year, but that's not the most unusual thing in the world to have happen after a heavy volume distribution day such as we saw on Thursday.
What to do, what to do? Well if your like me your picking up your toys and going home. My oldest brother is 6-5 and over 200lbs, I learned a long time ago that big kids who want to whop your butt have no problem doing so, and the only recourse you really have is hiding out with mom. So, my money, my clients money is basically still sitting in cash. I'm still working on getting some positive return out of the market. The accounts remain at their high water mark, but there is not much upside movement going on for us. The good news I suppose is that there is no downside movement which should make it easier for me to get paid when things do turn around and opportunities present themselves, which will happen.