Tuesday Outlook: Questioning This Rally

Even Superman was short!

JPMorgan’s (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon is feeling the same as our super hero on the right. A hastily made deal leads to an unintended loophole which puts JPM in scramble mode leaving an opening for Bear Stearns (BSC) shareholders. Obviously with BSC stock pushing $12, investors must believe they have the leverage to force an even better deal.

So stocks rally mightily again due to this nonsense [and these guys are geniuses?] and of course the “better than expected” home sales data. Look, whenever realtors start using the word “stable” to describe markets you should know the sky is falling. Did anyone really think home sales data was as MarketWatch described, “upbeat”?

But let’s not fight the reality of the tape and an obvious end-of-quarter ramp now fully underway.

Yahoo/Finance breadth data is way off [in fact advance/decline data is reversed there] so let’s just view WSJ data. Overall an excellent day but volume wasn’t particularly heavy.



And, what volume there was clearly was in financials and related issues:




An intraday chart of the S&P 500 SPDR ETF (SPY) shows the sharp push higher at the open and the next hour, then the powers that be were content to manage things the rest of the day with some profit-taking into the close.







































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