Drifting

It was another very slow down of trading, but we had a positive tone, and the bears were unable to dig their claws in, even though we had a fair amount of bad news this week. Weekly unemployment claims, consumer confidence and sentiment, as well as housing numbers all came in below expectations, but the buyers were willing to shrug it off. While the action was generally positive, it lacked zest. There just isn't a lot of strong momentum. We'll had some impressive action in retailers, and the big-cap technology names finally delivered some upside today, but we didn't have this extremely aggressive dip buying like we saw so often last year. Underperforming market players were constantly trying to catch up with the market last year, but that has not been an issue this year. We have some very clear technical overhead in the S&P500 at the 50-day moving average and the recent highs around 1108-1110. It wouldn't surprise me to see a break above that level, triggering buy stops and then a reversal, but we'll worry about that next week. For now, we are in this drifty, low-volume environment and waiting for a clearer trend to develop. I can imagine both bullish and bearish scenarios going forward, but my style is to react as things develop rather than to anticipate (usually).