200 Protesters is Not a Movement and 7 Up Stocks is Not a Rally

This will be a data and chart-free post as I am otherwise engaged at the moment – but anyone who was trading in the fall of 2007 knows for a fact that we are in the exact same type of environment here, empirically or not (if you’d like to put some meat on these bones with some data, get at me in the comments section below).

Today we’re watching $AAPL melt up to new all-time highs (at $411 or so) and the usual pockets of strength in the MoMo All-Stars ($LULU, $GMCR, $CMG) all up 3% plus.  This with the Nasdaq down 1.5% and the S&P 500 bathed in blood, the Dow off 200 also.  This is a rally like those 200 schmucks with signs are “Occupying Wall Street”…

Am I suspicious about the strength in the “Chosen Ones” as we head into the end of the third quarter with such a huge percentage of managers underperforming their benchmarks?  Yes I am, even as I’m long some of them…this is total performance chase, more window-dressing going on here than at Saks Fifth Avenue on Black Friday.

If you were around in the fall of 2007, then you remember this action, you’d have to.  That feeling where you just throw your hands up and say “If you don’t own ABC and XYZ, you might as well not even bother coming to work.”

That’s exactly where we are now.  So will the rest of the market turn and look more like Apple and Amazon?  Or is the negative breadth telling us something wicked this way comes?