After a 5 year delay, our west coast trip is almost upon us. Flying to Seattle and with multi-night stays in Seattle, San Fran and San Diego we'll be working our way down the coastline during a 13 day trip. We can't wait.So, where are we as far as the stock market? In no-mans land, that's where. Basically the market has gone nowhere in 2 months.On May 5th, the S&P closed at 903. Yesterday it closed at 898. In between we peaked at 956, so it's been an up and down ride. The big question though is, where to from here? And surprise, there are two possibilities. Up or down. No shit, right? Quarterly corporate results will start coming out soon. But nobody knows what to expect. Will the banks continue with the smoke and mirrors making their balance sheets look better or reality settle in? Reality being that things ain't gettin' no better.The charts are just as confused. You can look at them one way and see that we're due for a major leg down from here since we've hit a major resistance line and would see new lows below 666. Or we could have one more impressive rally up 1000-1100 on the S&P before the major leg down below 666.I'm actually favoring the scenario of one more leg up. Euphoria needs to set in before we plummet to the abyss. We're not there yet. A 20% rally from here would have 98% of the people dancing in the streets proclaiming the recession is over and things are back to normal.I won't get into it again, but we're far from back to normal. There is still a lot of unwinding to do and a lot of fixing to be done.So, as I head off on vacation I'll be looking to see if I should move the retirement money in for a final move up. Otherwise I'll just keep watching from the sidelines.If there's any fun in the markets, I'll post during the trip.============Here's a quickie from a blog I follow...David Rosenberg has been on
Squawk Box for the past hour.
He has been dropping the unvarnished Truth on the kids, powering through a basic set of reality regardless of dropped jaws and stunned silence.
None of the things he is discussing is at all radical. Its simply clear-eyed, straight forward, reality based analysis. No hope, no cheerleading, no bull. Its like a bucket of cold water versus the feel good warm fuzzies the long-only, fully invested crowd (aka, the pompom squad) that typically comes on TV to talk their books.
• Green Shoots was unsubstantiated nonsense;
• Unemployment Rate will rise considerably higher; this will be the “mother of all jobless recoveries.”
• The rise from the 666 lows was the mother of all oversold bounces due to multiple expansion, not profit gains;
• The S&P500 is likely to have earnings of a modest $50 over the next 4 quarters;
• Unemployment is usually a lagging indicator when we are dealing with an inventory or manufacturing recession; During a credit crisis recession, Unemployment is a coincident indicator cycling back into the economy in a negative way;
• We are going through a massive consumer deleveraging
• The Consumer is not going to save the economy anytime soon.
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