Kingdom of Rust/Ill-Placed Trust

Sloan - 4 Songs Not at the Palais Royale

Since my previous post focused on Canada, how aboot a Chinese-fire-drill-esque set of four Sloan songs not at the Palais Royale.

Let's start with the coolest-looking video, I've Gotta Try, with Andrew taking the lead:



Next up, Patrick takes off his ridiculous fur coat, straps on a Flying V and unleashes a sick riff in All Used Up:



Jay takes us down a notch with Lines You Amend:



And Chris celebrates Canada with Rest of My Life:

Flying High Again

Flying High Again - Sloan

I was going to post Sloan's "If It Feels Good Do It" video, but the live versions on YouTube aren't all that great, and the choice didn't quite fit, as I didn't do anything today while the market surged. Actually, I've been felled by a cold and been feeling quite crappy, so I napped through the market's surge during the last 90 minutes of trading.

Before snoozing, I pulled two blog posts that I was going to examine this evening. No really, I was going to spotlight these posts before they looked too good to be believed.

First, Phil from Phil's Stock World was prescient in this morning's e-mail/post:

We’ve seen how fast this market can whipsaw up and I wouldn’t be too surprised to see even the anticipated Fed cut Weds boost us 1,000 points by Thurs. Whether or not we hold it is another story, but this is starting to look more and more like rotation out of commodities and into some very beaten down stocks. Can they get more beaten down? Sure - but then we buy more and sell more premium. Don’t forget there is the old saying that "you can’t fight the Fed" but this isn’t just the Fed, this is the entire G7 acting in unison to move the markets. Perhaps the global crisis is so severe that not even that will help but, if so - then nothing really matters anyway does it?"

It looks like Tuesday's market already took care of that 1K point surge.

Second, Bespoke noticed that the S&P is long due for a 20% rally:

Now Number Four: Ten Largest S&P 500 Declines Without a Rally

Following yesterday's sharp sell off in the final minutes of trading, the S&P 500 is now down 45.76% from its October 2007 closing high. On a closing basis, this makes the current period the fourth largest decline in the S&P 500 without a 20% rally. The only three other periods where we had deeper declines were in 1931, 1938, and 1974.

Today's rally pushed the S&P 500 to 940.51, 12% off its recent intra-day low of 839.80. A 20% rally would bring the S&P up to 1007.76, so we're not there quite yet.

And even with the robust upward move, very few S&P 500 components are trading above their 50-day moving averages: