Refreshing...

Even though we had more wild point swings (800pts) during the day,  the mid-day 900 SPX tug of war hold and end of day action has to be encouraging.    Finally, we are seeing some sort of bargain buying that isn't led by financial institutions.  It was positive not see the EOD "forced selling" and the battered commodity related plays didn't pop as much in the past.  Also after a few earnings reports in steel,  it seemed most doom is priced in as they had decent days from the start.   Even though we continue to think this sector will struggle for a few more Q's from a weakening demand environment,   the stocks share prices are discounting too great an earnings decline.    Actually, this is the first up day in a long time that an upwards move is not a "credit rally". 

Wednesday's late action was bad and once again everyone seemingly took the notion that no equity should be worth anything in the face of a severe recession.    Today,  apparently we had people realizing even in the worst of a recession, some of the equity prices just look pretty darn good at the current level.      Judging from the after-hour action from some of the companies we know very well,  we think market may be able to put behind this "crisis attitude" and focus on relative value, for a change.

This is good news, for us!    Honestly,  you can only go so long with this intraday sniper action.    Believe it or not, both SPX and Naz have nearly tested last week's low and both bounced off pretty convincingly.   Technically,  that's also a very good sign.    Is it time to get busy again?    We sure like to hope so and if this market does not give us an opportunity in an earning period, who knows if it ever will.

The bottom line, we are looking for relative performance among the earning reports and we don't have any favouritism on any particular play or sector.    If it's a beta stock or a boring stock that get the market vote,  so be it!    We'd expect our alert page to get more active in the coming days/ weeks.   Simply, our tone has changed towards this market as of today, we're not going on a buying spree, we're just more open- minded to go long overnight here and there and buy some dips on stocks at these levels.  The daily fluctuations, intraday day swings won't stop and so holding on tight to a buy will also become a strong possibility,  if it's not a decline starting off some negative headline noise in the markets.