"Defying Gravity"

Well, this market has stunned us again!    Going into today, no one, absolutely no one, expected to finish the day in the green, let alone up 135 points.    Frankly, we are more puzzled than concerned about this market.    Given another hour, perhaps all of the companies that were down big in AH last night might have had a chance to finish in the green.    The only logical explanation to this is that people think all of the bad news has already been cooked into the current price and things will not get worse.    This is where we get puzzled.   When a company guides its future quarter down, it always leaves room for potentially more downside.    This is understood by everyone and most of us tend to trade on this assumption.     Maybe, an irrational explanation is that people are just so sick of bad news and they actually buy things instead of dumping for a change.    Is this just messed up thinking or just lame?   You be the judge!

On the other side of the spectrum, all commodity plays got rocked again!   This is undoubtedly due to the weak oil and natural gas price.  The reason for the decline in energy prices is that apparently a hurricane which is suppose to hit and disrupt the supply of oil/gas just won't happen anymore.    Of course, we have to respect mother nature and the trading action associated with it

So right at this moment, we pretty much have no plays at our hands.    Commodity won't do much unless energy prices stabilize and we don't mean stabilize for a day.    The trend has to stabilize or otherwise any attempted rally will be squashed quickly, as we have seen from recent coal, shale, steel action.    Agri plays are at an interesting juncture here as POT will be releasing eps on 24th and both MOS, CF releasing their earnings next week.    We will be following their action very closely.

For those that are just dying for plays, there are FSYS and RBN, both made a new closing high today.    These are couple of plays we played in the past, in an on and off fashion.    We are simply pointing out the fact that they made a nch and you may want to keep an eye on them in case they gain continued momentum from the nch. ILMN AXYS had pretty good EPS and may be a consideration at some point,maybe today
We are still waiting for a shining eps winner to come out and we are being patient for just that. The smaller caps will be coming soon.   We aren't going to step into the "regional financial rally" crowd as that's something we'd still want to avoid.