With the New Year just weeks away, I’m as curious as the next guy about whether the Dow will soar, slither or slump in 2014 . For the moment, it has taken a breather after impaling the 16087 midpoint resistance shown. The overshoot may look minuscule, but it’s actually 88 points — probably enough for us to infer that bulls have the moxie to eventually push this vehicle to the midpoint’s D sibling, 17622. It also implies that a retracement to the green line, which lies 565 points beneath current levels and  855 points off the all-time high, should be regarded not as threatening, but as a potential buying opportunity.

This very bullish assessment is purely mechanical and goes sharply against my gut feeling that there are too many negatives weighing on stocks, the huge cost of Obamacare chief among them, for the stock market to make much headway. When there are conflicts or doubts in my outlook, however, I have learned to trust my bland technical indicators over mere facts and logic. In any event, we’ll wait and see how energetically the Indoos attack the red line, assuming they do so at all. Of course, if rumors prove true that no Tapeworm will be announced as a result of the Fed’s most recent meeting, the red line could be chop suey by midweek.