Yesterday's rally on Wall Street faded coming down the stretch, supposedly because oil prices jumped on concerns over Nigerian supply. We saw the news as nearly irrelevant, however. It looked like a purely technical day, with DaBoyz testing the mettle of bears by manipulating a fairly powerful short-squeeze on the opening. With no negative news of significance on the tape, the specialists simply stepped aside and let shorts work their magic. And so they did, buying with the kind of urgency that bulls very seldom can muster. An hour into the session, the Dow Industrials were up about 185 points. But the short-covering ran out of steam after another hour, perhaps because there was not enough news of any kind for the spinmeisters to spin. Retail sales were up a little bit for a change, and although the news was a day old, it could not have hurt. But because the tax-rebate effect is presumably close to exhaustion, we doubt it will have much of an impact on sales, let alone on stocks, in the weeks and months ahead. (For our part, we're not sure whether we already spent the rebate or not, since there were some extraordinary household expenses to deal with before the check even arrived.) Even though there was not much news to power stocks, there was certainly enough of it to entertain. The item of the day concerned Yahoo!, which appears to have escaped the greedy clutches of Carl Icahn. While Icahn would have us believe that his corporate-raider shtick is rooted in his deep concern for the welfare of shareholders, we know an unregenerate mercenary when we see one. Icahn has been trying to force Yahoo! to sell itself to Microsoft for upwards of $34 a share, but his plan went down in flames yesterday (see
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