We sometimes forget that whenever the stock market misbehaves with breathtakingly bizarre perversity, that it is merely punishing traders who harbor fantasies of reaping easy profits by doing the obvious. Friday, for instance. Before the opening bell, Fannie Mae shares were getting slaughtered on news of huge new write downs, and full-blown war was erupting between Georgian Russia and a well-armed army of Moscow-backed separatists. In Pakistan, Musharraf's by-now fragile stand against chaos was being threatened by impeachment. And yet, with all these new troubles to beset an already gravely troubled world, index futures were down only fractionally -- revving up for what turned out to be spectacular gains on the day. (Click on chart to enlarge) No less surreal was that gold futures, brain-dead as always to geopolitical tensions, were getting hammered, plummeting to within easy distance of an 850.10 target we'd been using to keep us profitably aligned with the opaque stupidity of the mindless herd. This perversely bullish tableau for a powerful stock-market surge was irresistible, and we said so in the chat room just before the opening bell: '[E-Minis] trading 10 points beneath overnight lows, strongly against expectations...and reality. Suggests DaBoyz are keen on buying 'em this morning.' And boy were they ever! Within an hour, the Industrial Average was up 216 points, on its way to a 303 point gain. And celebrating�what? The economic survival of our planet for yet one more precious day? Easy to Predict Ironically, the stock market has never been easier to read. Predicting its movements each day would be far more difficult if price action were tied in some discernible way to the observable facts of the real world. But in actuality, the stock market has come to be 99% dominated by short-term traders, and so, the more obvious the bullishness or bearishness
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