Bernie Didn't Help

According to Bloomberg, Bernie's speech today amounted to...

"Chairman Bernanke gave only opening remarks on conference issues and did not comment on monetary policy.  There was no Q&A."

I've had a pretty good look around and I'd be wrong to say that today doesn't have a distinct feel of distribution. There are few bright spots, there are many transitory assets (between trades) and all in all, it's what I'd call ugly. Hit the panic button, load up on shorts ugly? For the day, it kind of looks that way, but I've seen the market flip in a half day so many times that I'd just say, "A day a trend does not make".

Therefore, I'll sit pat, I was hoping to have a decent trade for today like TLT Tuesday and MCP today just to keep some income flowing, but as I said, a lot of assets are in a transitional stage.

The TICK tells the story for the day, it's bouncing back and forth between + and - 1000, that's not an EXTREME, but it's indicative of a lot of movement and to me it looks like a lot of indecision, when there's indecision most pros will reduce their risk so that may be why today is uglier than yesterday.

Once again, it will be up to the futures tonight to tell us if there's any meaningful changes. For now I'm not panicking, I'm not taking on any risk without good cause and I don't see any great causes for that today so it's a day of patience.

It's even difficult to pull any decent analysis out of the market today.

The one thought I keep having centers on the IWM. We had two good days up and not the kind of breakout that it needs to get retail pumped. I've seen this a lot of times, it's kind of like trying to get a car out of the sand in which you have to generate momentum by putting it in reverse and then drive and then reverse again to get a head start on the next swing forward.

To me, it looks like the IWM needs to put it in reverse before it can make another shot at forward or up in this scenario.

  It's just kind of hard to believe that Wall St. would give up all the goodies just above right now, but if this debt ceiling issue doesn't start to take on some tone of cooperation and the U.S. is going to default on its debt for the first time ever in little more than a couple of weeks, then that's a pretty bearish event to overcome with gimmicks and manipulations.