Here we go again with the live-by-oil-die-by-oil nonsense. The fact that oil inventories dropped by one day's worth of oil from the Canadian oil sands, or two-thirds of a tanker full of oil, shouldn't matter that much.
But it does. In fact, it's pretty much all that matters and I find it a shaky basis for a rally.
Wouldn't it be better if it were based on the fundamentals rather than a few ephemeral barrels?
No matter, that's how it is.
We've got some bizarre leadership today: AIG (AIG) , which delivered the quarter the bulls have been waiting for; Intercontinental (ICE) on a five-for-one split along with a beat and a billion-dollar buyback; and the much-maligned Centene CNC, which, if you believe management, is the biggest winner as the huge HMOs pull out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges.
It's nice to see Allergan (AGN) rally from the perhaps BGL-inspired decline. Don't know what that is? Check the video above that Jack Mohr and I did about the alleged Biogen (BIIB) bid. BGL stands for "bag 'em, gun 'em and liquidate 'em," a time-honored, dishonest trick by bad-guy traders to get long options, gun them with chatter about a takeover and then sell into the run-up. (Allergan is part of TheStreet's Action Alerts PLUS portfolio.)
I have no idea if that's really what happened in this bogus story, but I suspect that someone who owned Biogen and or was short Allergan played a hand in it.
Good bounce-back.
Anyway, light volume day, the kind of day that makes me think about all of that Japanese government buying that our own diarist, James Gentile, wrote about earlier this morning. The Japanese, in their own way, have been the "bid underneath" for a lot of industrials, it seems, which could be part of the reason they were able to hold up so well through earnings.
Who knows? But the possibility of breaking the streak of Dow down days -- currently at seven as we work off that incredible overbought position not that long ago -- is no longer as remote as it seemed when I woke up this morning to still one more "slated to be" down day.
