Like A Bad Stock

If the question of the day was whether the bulls would show up again to defend their gains, I think we have our answer!

Along with recent buys form Soros, Buffett, and Lampert, lower oil prices and more M&A activity were the likely culprits to today's positive action. I also suspect that, like everyone else, the ETFs are really juicing the action as short-sellers keep getting clocked and gains around the world are dragging us along for the ride. For example, while new highs in the Dow may seem impressive, they fail in comparison to the returns seen worldwide. Just pulling up a list of top ETF intra-day gainers for today and you'll see that the Dow's performance is far below those with interests beyond our borders (i.e. Brazil, Latin America, Emerging Markets, etc.).

The U.S. market continues to act like a bad stock in a really great sector of the market. In other words, with the global boom worldwide and the gains seen across the globe, the U.S. market is moving higher along with everything else whether deserved or not. That's also why we continue to see a huge migration toward companies that have international exposure. The more global the better and there's good reason for that. At the same time, those who think the U.S. would be able to brush off weakness and corrections in global markets are seriously underestimating the influence they now have on our market. We saw only a brief glimpse of that in late February and we're seeing the positive side of that right now as our markets continue to hit new highs.