The market ended last week in a good mood, but is still struggling to gain enough traction for a sustained breakout beyond 1100 on the S&P500. The question in everyone’s mind:  Is it simply consolidating in preparation for a big Santa Claus rally? There are certainly plenty of market observers on both sides of the fence.

Black Friday was black in more ways than one, with a number of negative events. Still the market held up reasonably well.  Perhaps there’s nowhere else to get an acceptable return on one’s cash. At least the stock market has shown some strength, and valuations with a few exceptions are reasonable from a historic perspective.

I rather expected the market to be somewhat slow this week, waiting to see what would happen on Black Friday (traditionally initiating the period when retailers go from posting a loss to turning a profit). Instead, the market rose rapidly this morning, up nearly 2% in the first couple of hours. It later tailed off a bit but still closed as a very good day.

Healthcare, InfoTech, and Consumer Staples continue to lead in the Sector Detector ETF rankings, based on Sabrient’s fundamentals-based SectorCast model. Actually, they increased their scores this week relative to the other sectors as the bottom-up speculative rally led to further overvaluation in the fundamentally weaker sectors. 

Riding a wave of positive corporate announcements -- among them, CISCO (Nasdaq: CSCO); The Blackstone Group (NYSE: BX); Coca Cola Bottling (Nasdaq: COKE); and Dynergy (NYSE: DYN) -- and a number of positive economic releases, the market bullied its way through resistance to make net gains every day last week for the S&P 500. The result was a 3.2% gain for the S&P and consistent strong market action through all cap/styles and all sectors.

Volatility returned to the marketplace with a vengeance last week, and we should be prepared for more of the same this week. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday the market moved 2% or more – in opposite directions each day.  The S&P 500 was down 2% on Wednesday, up more than 2% on Thursday, and down again on Friday nearly 3%.

Last week, the market was very selective, with only Large-cap Growth in positive territory -- think Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Amazon (Nasdaq:  AMZN), and American Express (NYSE: AXP). All other cap/styles were negative -- and the smaller you were, the more you lost. In fact, this entire month the market has beat up on small-caps with its "the smaller you are, the more you lose" bias.

by David Brown, Chief Market Strategist

David Brown