Monday, September 26, 2011

The Market Will Open Higher . . . Darn It!

History is more interesting than instructive, unfortunately!  If you re-read Friday's blog, you'll recall the observation by the revered Art Cashin of the Thursday/Monday syndrome, whereby Thursday is very bad, Friday is choppy and Monday is terrible (reflecting "capitulation").  Then, a long bull market begins on Tuesday.

On Friday, I predicted this is unlikely without some hope of fixing the European crisis.  Over the weekend, I studied this historical phenomena and found there is some evidence of this pattern.  Loving history, I began to weakly hope today would be terrible, and history would repeat itself, with a bull market starting tomorrow.

The good news/bad news this morning is that the Dow will open higher about 100 points.  Maybe, sometime during the day, some horrible news will be announced, scaring the retail investors out of the market, producing a "crash," and the strong bull market can begin tomorrow.  But, I still think that, even if the market crashes today, there can be no recovery without hope of resolving the European crisis.

Maybe, history does repeat itself . . . but not often enough!