Wednesday's despairing wallow retraced all of the previous day's short-squeeze rally. To make things worse, the decline was continuous, more or less, from the opening bell. What has the NYSE come to when the floor specialists can't even muster a head-fake on the opening to sandbag widows, orphans and pensioners? Granted, the previous day's rally completely lived up to our expectations, showing the staying power of a rutting lion that has been denied sex for a fortnight. But still, how much marginal buying power could it take for Da Boyz to set stocks a-wafting when shorts were already primed with fear, as they were by Tuesday's crypto-salacious tidbits from the Fed? Ordinarily, we would infer from this flaccid performance that the stock market is staging for a cliff-dive. And perhaps it is. But before we assume that one day's weakness is likely to lead to another, we must take into account that would-be sellers are every bit as complacent as would-be buyers are uninspired. This isn't really a battle between bull and bear, but a 110-rounder between snail and earthworm. Since neither looks capable of landing a decisive blow, their fates may have to be settled one day by some hellish predator that swoops down out of the blue. Dare we hope that we are merely spectators when that day finally arrives? *** Optionetics Feedback I received some interesting feedback concerning yesterday's comments on Optionetics. A broker at a major retail house wrote of a branch audit that turned up zero profitable options accounts as well as the shocker that most of their covered writers had lost money over time. There was also the following letter from Aileen D., who said that an Optionetics talk she attended in Arizona seemed much like the one I described in my commentary: 'I recently
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