I don't blame you for not wanting to trust this market.
Aren't you being given a golden chance to bow out of it, literally 26 hours after Dennis Gartman told you he's gone all cash when he was on CNBC yesterday? Doesn't it make sense to sell everything because of higher gasoline prices, sequestration, no more payroll tax holiday, slowing China, sinking Europe and weakening housing (according to Toll Brothers (TOL))? Or at least according to news reports about Toll Brothers? How about copper and gold going down endlessly? Doesn't that signal the end of the world? Armageddon's beckoning, Mayan-like and the averages scoff at it.
What's going on here? How can this market not be clobbered. Some of it happens to be the anomaly of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) fighting back, confounding the critics. Others parts of it have to do with the age-old issue of shorts being put on that weren't immediately requited.
Oh, and there's that nagging problem of companies continuing to declare higher dividends and bigger buybacks exactly when people are betting against them, like Wal-Mart (WMT), which we found out from an errant email that February's a disaster. Now no one seems to care except the shorts, who are actively covering.
No, we are not out of the woods. We are simply recognizing that there are parts of the woods that aren't as scary as other parts
I still want to lean toward the sell side because of the drumbeat of sequestration woes and because gasoline and tax-holiday worries have become so standard that I tire of having to be whacked by them.
Still, the market feels a heck of a lot better than it did 26 hours ago when we got the Gartman bombing.
Just pointing it out! He could still be right!
