Ahhhhh.... cruising........ no worries mon, just drink this...... :)

Gotta love it.

Last week was a study in contrasts, with Friday being the most amusing. The volume was simply absent. Who was bidding up things Friday? Retail investors. The pros were all out at The Hamptons or elsewhere just blowing it off.

God, I hope you didn't buy.

ShopperTrak did their usual pump job yesterday and got people all excited that "Black Friday" really was. Unfortunately for them, the National Retail Federation posted actual numbers, not "boots on the ground" - and of course counting the "cha-ching!" is what really counts.

What did they find? Increased traffic but decreased sales.

NOT good. In fact, very, very bad; people are looking - lots of them - but not buying.

Grinchmas kids. Guess I won't be eating my Wall Street Journal eh?

Tomorrow the "real deal" comes back.

Here's reality - as I noted in APRIL the Consumer is hitting the wall. No, not everyone. The upper end is ok for now, but this starts at the bottom, of course. Middle Class Joe and Jane are simply out of money. They will NOT get through the holidays without cutting back - that was apparent in April, and now we're getting proof in the sales numbers.

On the credit crunch, watch out for the rapidly accelerating version of "aw ****!" coming soon to a credit market near you. Libor is spiking (very bad), the Eurodollar contracts are going ape****, and trading was suspended in some bond issues over in Europe last week. None of this is good. Oh, and Fannie/Freddie might have a little problem (I wonder if they have figured out how to count yet - they had a problem with that a couple of years ago if I remember correctly....)

Finally, we have what many are calling a Dow Theory confirmed Bear. Eeeehhh... I don't count it yet, and the reason is simple - I was wrong on the "ignore the tail" call on the Fed Surprise, so you have to be consistent - if the tail works in one place, it works in another. Thus, I want to see a DOW close below the swing lows, not the closing price, for confirmation. Nonetheless, there are a lot of people claiming we've got confirmation, and I bet a lot of people will trade that too, so my expectation is that we're arguing over formalities here, and not outcomes.

The rest of this I'm saving for the Technical..... which you can find right here!