Weekly Wrap Up

Another week, another 5% gain - isn’t the stock market easy? We’ve gained 1,400 points in 4 weeks from our March 9th low of 6,600 - pretty impressive on the whole - but we have suffered a serious decrease in upward momentum since March 23rd, when we finished at 7,775.  That’s 1,175 points in 10 sessions followed by just 225 over the next 9.  It’s a little hard to reconcile this very toppy sort of action with the "bull market" mania that has swept the media this past week.  We’ve been bracing ourselves for a slap of cold water all week that never really came although this weekend the WSJ ran this nasty unemployment graph along with an article titled: " Time to Brace for Trouple as Profits Debacle Starts " which reminds us why we went into the weekend 55% bearish . In last weekend’s post I warned : " Don’t forget I was looking for something like a 5% pullback and "all" we got was 2.5% so far " and it only took minutes out of the gate on Monday morning to give us the rest of that 5%.  I reposted our target levels on Monday morning  of Dow 7,636, S&P 805, Nas 1,525, NYSE 5,075 and Russell 420, which were well tested Monday and Tuesday until we got a proper breakout on Wednesday morning .  I was actually more optimistic on Monday than I am today as Monday our plan was we were hoping to hold our pullback levels and form a base we could build off.  The problem was the way we did rally made no sense - we didn’t climb a wall of worry - we climbed a wall of ACTUAL bad news that gave us brand new reasons to worry.  While the difference may sound subtle - it’s actually a big deal!  As a UBS economist I quoted in Monday’s post said:  " he housing market isn’t about to start booming, but the intensity of the pain will probably recede. "  This is the result of our abusive relationship with the markets as they declined over 50% in 6 months - the mere absence of pain is treated as pleasure. We had 4 new trade ideas from the Weekend Reading post in HIG, ING, FXE and BLK with all but HIG solidly performing already.  As with most of our stock entries, we have been hedging with puts and calls sold against to insulate us from another downturn - just in case…   Monday we got…
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