What a week! Â
As you can see from Dave Fry’s S&P chart, the volume, so far, is just over 5Bn vs. 10Bn+ in a normal week.  It’s just a bigger version of the pattern we’ve been in since we first tagged these highs in March (and we cashed out at the time) – rising on low volume and falling on high volume – a sure sign that the “smart money” is dumping shares on the foolish retailers. Â
Fortunately, for the Banksters, you really can fool some of the people all of the time – so there’s always a few suckers around willing to buy stocks – even when they hit their all-time highs after mediocre earnings. Â
Perhaps this time is different.  After all, we had a little dip in January but, with May winding down, no one is really selling – are they? Â
The nice thing about writing a blog is that it helps improve my memory and I do remember another May when we were drifting along at all-time market highs and we were going up on low volume and dipping on high volume – but never far enough to call it a sell-off.  I was warning people to get to cash back then as well – but no one wanted to listen as we were in the midst of a huge market run and no one wanted to “miss it.”
On the Friday before Memorial Day, 2008 (5/23), I warned:
Is George Bush destroying the his core base of support? Well, maybe not Texas but here’s a red and blue state map from the Philly Fed (thanks Barry for pointing this out!) not of Democratic and Republican strongholds but of the Fed’s Coincident Index, which is an index of economic indicators whose movements closely coincide with the overall cycle of economic activity. Along with lagging and leading indicators, this index highlights the speed and size of growth or shrinkage in an economy. Texas is doing just great on the oil boom but many other Republican strongholds are suffering deeply while the “blue states” are mainly blue, indicating growth despite all the economic turmoil:
