Seasonality usually romps on Wall Street ahead of Memorial Day weekend, but this year the party was relatively subdued. As much might be said of the Rick’s Picks chat room, where things quieted down around mid-morning as regulars departed, presumably for exotic getaway spots around the world. I’d offered a few trades for Friday in the Touts section, all of them geared toward bottom-fishing a weak opening. It was not to be, however, and we never even came close to grabbing a piece of Google, the Diamonds or the Cubes before they wafted higher from the opening bell. Stocks seemed buoyed not so much by enthusiastic buying as by a relative dearth of sellers.

Placid as the day may have seemed, it began with the Nasdaq 100  (QQQQ) teetering on a ledge. For, in fact, it would not have taken much of a fall beneath the previous day’s lows to create a bearish impulse leg on the daily chart. The last time this occurred was in February, when the Martin Armstrong swoon had us convinced for a brief instant that something important was happening.

The QQQQ chart was reproduced in Friday’s Touts to show graphically just how precarious is the life of a seemingly robust bull market. We all know some tennis or golf buff who collapsed in mid-game, dead of a massive heart attack not even a week after we saw him looking fit as a fiddle. Well, that’s about where the stock market is right now – and where it shall be when the bear comes on like…a coronary.  We can all enjoy it while it lasts. Have a great holiday weekend!