Assault

End of last week we discussed the weekend coming and the possibility of headlines giving the market a short term direction.  Good or bad, just to get things going a bit.  Well, we got a bunch of headlines Monday morning and none of them were good for the bull.   Yesterday, seemed like a slow orderly death as the GS downgrade of Citigroup, the delinquencies in auto loans at GMAC, the Chinese curbing lending, some ugly retail numbers played havoc, leading to an assault on the very important technical levels, the DJIA 13000 and the SPX 1440-50 levels.   Seemingly all wanted to get out before the holiday and possibly start fresh next week, this was most visible in any high beta stock carrying more risk.   You might argue the big money is away this week and they won't burn the turkey while away, but in the age of the computerized black box trading it doesn't take much to leave the switch on and many are set to go off as these levels on the indices are assaulted on.   We just don't know exactly where and we don't want to find out being long.  So, despite the very oversold conditions once again like last week, we are very cautious in stepping a foot in this market.   It is best to wait it out here and if the FED minutes or its specualtion give reason to bounce, well then we will bounce and flip a few stocks into the close.  But...as far as holding stocks overnight and continuously waking up to gap downs is out of the question now.  The pre-open negatives are rampant and it is hard to imagine waking to any good news at this point.  You might catch a nice trade intraday these days and decide to hold for some follow through the next day...unfortunately, it is not happening and you end up trading from your heels.   It's very easy to fall on your butt from this position as all it takes is one nudge...one or two sellers who will get out at any cost and the lack of bidders will do the trick in many of the plays we liked around here.  You simply cannot trade on the defensive and be successful.  If you have that defensive and/or worry feel in a stock, it is best to get out.   The seasonal bias is on the bull side come late this week, hopefully we can just recover some on the indices (getting over Thursdays/Fridays lows would be a start) and set up for early next when the big bull money might come to play this corrective slaughter.....if there is any left!.   We'd prefer to see it that way, instead of bouncing hard this week on very average volume and the Bears coming back and saying it was only on low/average volume.  They'd have a point!.