Is the market hitting a wall of resistance…or just refueling before takeoff? Today, the SPY (an ETF that tracks the S&P 500) was up for the twelfth consecutive day. So the question is, can it continue without a pullback to shake out the weaker holders? Let’s look at the numbers.

I have a special story for you this week about a pair of stocks, but let’s begin with our usual market overview.

If the bulls had been paying attention to the economic indicators reported last week, you’d assume the market would be down substantially by now.  The fact is, however, that the S&P 500 is just down about -0.4% for the past calendar week, and today it’s up over a full percent. Obviously, the bulls didn’t see the surprising drop in Consumer Confidence, which fell to 46.0 from 56.6 in January, its lowest reading since early last year.

There’s a whole lot of flip-flopping going on in the market right now.  Today it went nowhere on no news at all, but if you’d told me the economic indicators for last week were going to report bad-to-not-so-bad numbers and corporate earnings would be split between disappointing and just okay, I would have said that the market would tank.

It worked .  .  . last week the market reversed Monday Mania, starting the week with a down day and ending in a bullish mood.

Since the market ditched its typical Monday mania today, maybe we can escape the inevitable depression that has followed in its wake.

Forget that the market was down for the fourth consecutive week on Friday.  Investors woke up in a new world today and sent the market soaring.   It is Monday, after all.

Perhaps it was the new senator from Massachusetts who let the bears out, but I suppose it was a bit more than that. When the week began on Tuesday, after the Martin Luther King holiday, the bulls were grazing happily on GARP stocks, as contented as California cows.  But then somebody opened that gate, and the bears roared through and the bulls ran for cover.

Several comments to this week’s article on SeekingAlpha  (“What the Market Wants:  A Week of Murk and Fog”) have prompted me to make a few points of clarification.

Last week brought us murk and fog in an otherwise bright New Year. All style/caps were down for the week, though not drastically. The worst was Small-cap Growth (- 1.12%); the best was Large-cap Growth (-0.6%); and the rest crowded between these uninspiring returns. But given the tremendous amount of cash on the sidelines, the market seems unlikely to turn disastrous.