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Strategies & Market Trends : Waiting for the big Kahuna -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James F. Hopkins who wrote (21737)	7/16/1998 2:01:00 PM
From: Lucretius	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 94695

take a gander at this that I posted yesterday: FINALLY.. this one is the clincher!!! Voices from the past??? I came across this, and it virtually made me positive that the top is coming right SOON. Compare the following from 1987 w/ an article written this Tuesday by my favorite blow-hard and buffoon, James J. Cramer. "In a market like this, every story is a positive one. Any news is good news. It's pretty much taken for granted now that the market is going to go up." - Wall Street Journal, 8/26/87, (the day after the 1987 market peak) Wrong! Jul 14, 1998 Wrong! Dispatches from the Front: Cramer Says It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This By James J. Cramer Was it the vacation, or is this market just glad to see me? Tech, banks, and drugs all going higher -- it doesn't get any better than this. In the meantime, talking heads drone on about caution in the background and how dangerous everything is out there. Wake up and smell the Bokar. This is a tape that likes bad news and loves good news. Merck (NYSE:MRK - news) gets a shoo-in approval for some drug? Let's take it up a couple. Nothing bad happening at Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) ? Let's give that a higher multiple. Things sounds just okay at Intel (Nasdaq:INTC - news) ? Heck, that's better than terrible -- let's expand the multiple. No preannouncements in hardware techland? Well, let's unleash the purse strings and put that money to work. Japan in disarray? Love disarray. Oil drillers announcing bad numbers? OK, we aren't that stupid. They still won't go up. There is dog food that even dogs won't eat. What does this mean when everything except the most horrible situations rally? It means there is a ton of money around -- so much so that it wants to buy anything. It wants to be in the winners (Microsoft, Dell (Nasdaq:DELL - news) , Merck). It wants to play catch-up (Intel). It wants to bottom-fish: buying beat-up banks. Liquidity is something that doesn't get measured that easily. We have AMG Data, but I find it haphazard. We have mutual fund cash positions, but those cease to matter when cash became illogical to have at most of these mutual funds. We have bull-bear ratios, but they don't explain it either. Liquidity is something that can be seen, not counted. You can smell it. You can even taste it. But you can't measure it. Right now I feel like I am up to my ears in market liquidity. It is so great that it lifts all boats except those that are splitting in two, Titanic-like, and even those don't go down as fast as they should. (I highlighted that just for laughs! wait till he watches her sink to the bottom and he has no lifeboat. That water is awfully cold!!!) With expiration coming this week, I wonder whether we are not in for some terrific ramp-up to the top end of the trading range. If Applied Materials (Nasdaq:AMAT - news) only goes down 1 on an awful number, what does Intel do on a less-than-awful number? And what happens when companies report good numbers this week? Maybe bears ought to do some midsummer hibernating this week.