I am decreasing the amount of posting, at least for the time being. 

Since I began this blog, I have made an effort to post on finance and markets at least once a day Monday through Thursday, and on economics on the weekend.  For a variety of reasons, I am no longer going to maintain this schedule over the immediate future.  Instead, I will post periodically when an issue of particular interest arises.

T.

I continue to hedge down my positions and am now primarily in cash, with some long exposure remaining.  Over the next few days, if the market plays out the way I think it will, I will get net flat or perhaps even short.  If I am wrong, then I will reverse my positions and become more aggressive.  I have not sold any of my stocks bar one, and expect to add to positions on a downdraft. 

We are full-fledged members of the Tom Toles cheerleading squad.

From The Onion

I sold out all my leveraged ETFs today.  This rally has come quite far, and though I think there is more upside to come, I think the probability of a pullback is high. 

I was very long, and I am still long but I now have a pile of cash I intend to put to work if the market goes down.  If we really begin to roll over, I'll get flat or perhaps net short.  But if the market appears to be going higher, I'll buy back in.

For now, as a trade, I am cautious.

It is still too early to call a bottom in housing.  However, it is not too early to begin looking for an end to the collapse in housing prices. 

And we are seeing evidence that the end is not far off.  As the Wall Street Journal notes this morning, bidding wars are emerging for foreclosed properties.

On its conference call yesterday, the Chairman and CEO of Packaging Corp stated that orders for corrugated boxes have risen substantially thus far in April.

The S&P 500 rose 17 points today, closing at 850, retracing about half the decline from yesterday.

Volume picked up, with the NYSE Composite trading 7.2 billion shares compared to Monday’s 6.85 billion shares.  Volume has averaged about 6.7 billion shares since the beginning of February.

Breadth was 5:1 to the upside.  Yesterday, breadth was 27:1 on the downside as the button-pushers did their thing. 

Yesterday, we noted a few parallels with the bear market of the 1970s, which bottomed in December 1974.  Today, Michael Milken makes the same analogy.

Maoxian has a great graph of Nouriel Roubini's world victory tour perhaps marking the bottom of the market.