All day today I wanted to be bearish. I read Doug's columns and I found them very persuasive. Plus, I can't say I am crazy about a set-up based on various short squeezes all over the place like the ones in the cloud and the ones in semiconductors, although they sure passed by Broadcom (BRCM).
But I keep coming back to how broad based this whole rally is. I keep thinking, like my friend and colleague at TheStreet Matt Horween, that we may be just forming a gigantic, well-rounded base. As he just pointed out to me, we have not really surged if you look at a long-term monthly chart.
Plus it is not like we are seeing froth all over the place. They aren't running up bogus biotech or small-cap semiconductors or device stocks that don't make sense.
Instead these are mostly backing-and-filling advances with pockets of selling that are quickly met with buyers, although usually not as fast as Facebook (FB) was today.
To me the buy-on-a-pullback view is something that people espouse, but don't really do. I heard lots of people talking about buying Facebook and Blackberry (still RIM (RIMM) at the moment) on pullbacks, but when they get them they want more of a pullback. You just aren't getting that "more of a pullback" that would make it so easy to join the advance.
To me, the best way to look at this market is with the stocks of the companies I had on "Mad Money." We got a Sell on KeyCorp (KEY) from Bernstein today and the stock barely got hit and then came back and next thing you know I am listening to the CEO and I am thinking "how could a guy put a Sell on a stock this cheap?"
Or Bill McDermott, the Co-CEO of SAP (SAP), comes on and, you know what, I think he's allowed to give his hard sell and deserves it when you consider the growth that he is having NOW in Europe and the share he is taking from everyone else. If only that stock would pull back? I doubt it. We just had a pullback to $77 and it lasted about as long as the blink of an eye.
Then there's Dunkin' Brands (DNKN). People wanted to throw doughnuts at Nigel Travis because international wasn't that strong. I think when he says, as he did on the call, that he has a personnel change that could make things better, I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. The stock's not cheap. But neither was Domino's (DPZ) at $30 and look where that went.
In other words, when I break the market down into its pieces, it just doesn't seem as nasty to me as Doug would make it sound in its entirety.
Just too many stocks like KeyCorp, SAP and Dunkin' out there to make my mouth water ... while I wait for the, ahem, proverbial pullback.
