Today Stunk

Here is the other side of conservatism that has helped us the past month... down 0.7% in a tape that is up 3.3%. We almost always lag on the huge up days but the nature of this up day is what irks me. (surprise... daddy's got more goodies for you ....)

Anyhow, today you would check the fund NAV @ 5:30 PM and say "what the heck! what is this guy doing! Going back to Heebner!"

The S&P finished on strength; it really feels like lab rats - Big Brother does his "savior" thing; the rats all buy in unison while cheering, and then like Charlie Brown the cheese is removed and the next selloff ensues. The rats (lemmings in this case) never change behavior. They will just continue to do it, until it works. Even as they watch their fellow rats lose jobs.

With the loss of dividends and degradation in earnings, the market is going to get expensive very quickly so we'll remain range bound but we are now somewhere in the middle. S&P 860 to 880 was the ceiling I presumed, but with the amount of Kool Aid out there that could be broken through. How quickly things change - Friday we were talking about S&P 800 breaking - leading to a retest of November lows. We're up a straight shot 10% from intraday lows Friday.

If I'm wrong about these resistance levels, we go back to conversations we were having the first week of January - S&P 920/940 as top side ceilings. Ping pong it is. I have a feeling I am going to be repeating myself a lot this year.

In the sign of the future of America - one where budgets will one day mean something may I bring you the proposal from the USPS to cut back mail delivery to 5 days a week. At least someone takes budget deficits seriously.

• Massive deficits could force the post office to cut out one day of mail delivery, the postmaster general told Congress on Wednesday, in asking lawmakers to lift the requirement that the agency deliver mail six days a week.
  
• Faced with dwindling mail volume and rising costs, the post office was $2.8 billion in the red last year.
• "If current trends continue, we could experience a net loss of $6 billion or more this fiscal year," Potter said in testimony for a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee. (I recommend changing to a bank holding company)
• Total mail volume was 202 billion items last year, over 9 billion less than the year before, the largest single volume drop in history. (that's only a 5% drop)
  

Email killed the postmaster star.