Effor.com

I was browsing through MarketWatch.com tonight and saw this story from Todd Harrison.  If you’re unfamiliar with Todd, he’s the founder of Minyanville.com, and he caused an uproar in the trading community last year when he announced that he had moved 100% of his long term money into cash.  The Dow was at 11, 346 when he said that.

Back to the story.  Today Todd says that he thinks a chart of 2009 is going to look like a “W”, and that “We’re currently dancing around the middle spike“.  In other words, the current spike in stocks is just a spike, and it’s going to head lower again.  I agree.

To explain his reasoning, Todd says “The market has room to run in the context of the lower highs that define a bear market. The first test will arrive around S&P 950, which is dual resistance in the form of the 200-day moving average and the one-year downtrend.”

The flies in the sustained recovery ointment are two-fold, which is why I’m of the view that this is a bear-market bounce. First, rampant inflation requires legitimate demand for goods and services coupled with the healthy velocity of money, neither of which can be artificially manufactured by the litany of government acronyms or tough talk from the Beltway.

Second is the unavoidable reality that the cure for an imploding debt bubble isn’t the inducement of more debt but rather the destruction of it. That is the single greatest flaw in the “all-clear” thesis; we’re swimming backwards against a growing tide of credit dependency and the cumulative imbalances that have built since the turn of the century.

Employment is still dropping, housing prices are still dropping, earning are still declining.  I see no reason to buy back in at this time.

gk

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