Good post Brian. Despite your denial I still believe you are a gambler. You are invested in the CLL which does not have a financial footings set for future expansion. We are all betting that the higher OIL price will save the company without asking shareholders for the dilution bailout.

Quick look at the CLL trading activity before running to the tennis club. RJ took the leadership role on CLL trading board. So far they sold and cross trade over 1.2 million shares.

Bellow is Marketclues last night commentary on US Dollar trade and market bubble. I like his view on this subject.

The lack of a correction in the stock market has been quite a puzzlement, not just to us, but almost everybody we know. But, we should have known why---it's the dollar effect again. During the big decline in DXY (the cash dollar index) last year , stocks got a big boost as the carry trade seemed to be at work pumping stock prices higher in inverse proportion to the fall in the dollar.

The suspicion was there among many that the stock market would be under pressure when the dollar bottomed and headed higher. Yet, all we saw was a flattening out of the uptrend in stocks even as the dollar soared and the Euro tanked. This was a sign that the carry trade may have been eliminated from the market.

Not so fast there. In late March DXY entered a correction after apparently forming a big leg up in the multiyear bull market. We're looking on this as a long term bull market and are quite willing to buy the dips and accumulate positions short the Euro, short the Yen and/or long the Dollar Index. But, what we failed to appreciate was that the weakness in DXY was generating the same kind of buying pressure in the stock market that we had last year when it was in full retreat.

Whether it's the same carry-trade mechanism isn't known, but stocks are certainly failing to correct their extremely overbought condition right now, so it's best to simply assume that the carry traders are at work.

It's also important to recognize that we're not in Kansas anymore. That is to say, investing in the last two years is "different" from investing before that time. The reason is that the Fed is keeping short term interest rates near zero and that fact simply changes most of the rules of trading.

Here's an example based upon a note we got from Interactive Brokers. They are offering to loan accountholders $566,000 for each $100,000 of securities held in their account and charge an interest rate of just 1¼%. They hinted in the note that you could buy utility stocks that had much higher yields than 1¼% and thus would be getting that loan at less than zero interest rate. (No wonder they're putting that ad on TV with the central bankers spraying money all over the landscape!)

Clearly, it's a money machine at work as long as the Fed keeps rates at zero. Everybody who can borrow at zero rates and loan it out at 1¼% is going to make money. IB makes money, the accountholder makes money, the stock market goes up. It's clearly an environment that never existed before this financial crisis. And, every time Ben Bernanke appears on TV and reiterates his firm decision to keep rates at this level, the market jumps hundreds of points.

So, this is the reason the market is not acting "normal" and is not responding to normal technical indicators. And, it's basically driving some folks nuts. As one emailer said this afternoon, "Bears are blowing away brains." Well, we doubt that they are literally, but figuratively, we wouldn't be surprised.

Knowing that the trend in stocks is scheduled to remain up into the middle of May, about a month hence, is certainly reassurance that this manic rally is probably just a blowoff phase like we see at the end of every bull market. As far as we've been able to tell, this may be the most overvalued the stock market has ever been in history (that will only be confirmed well into the future, of course, and is just a feeling at this point). We may be witnessing the largest financial bubble and its bursting in all of history over the next month. Or, could it last into late August? We shall see.

Back to the DXY, however, since that seems to be the catalyst for the last few weeks of mania (mix a declining DXY with very low interest rates and brokers willing to loan money at below dividend payments and you certainly get an explosive combination), If the five-wave move up from December is counted as a completed wave (1) up, we could be close to the end of wave (2) down right now. If so, we could be gearing up soon for a wave (3) advance that should be far more powerful than the December-March rally in number of points and in momentum.