What:  We will remain Neutral for now.

Why:  Yesterday was a battle of seasonal influences (up Mondays versus negative post-February option expirations) and it was a tug-of-war all day.  The market last week frustrated many of the short-term influences we prefer to rely on, as the overbought/under resistance/with negative seasonality trade only led to a market that continued to creep higher.  Yesterday's pause was enough to calm our most sensitive guides, though seasonality again turns curiously negative after tomorrow (see below) due to Mr. Bernanke's testimony.  I still suspect we're in for more weakness ahead, but as long as we're above 1100ish I'm not that interested in trying to anticipate it given last week's failure to reign in the price rise.  There may still be a short setup here in the next few days, but we'll take it a day at a time.

What:  We will remain Neutral for now.

Why:  On January 8th, the Dumb Money Confidence hit 75%, and nearly every time we've seen that kind of extreme in the past 15 years, any further short-term strength (over 2-4 weeks) was reversed longer-term (over 1-3 months).  Now that that's happened again, we're getting conflicting studies about whether the price action over the past two weeks is a sign of a larger trend change.  We don't have an overwhelming number of signs that we have seen a major market peak, and several sentiment measures turned very quickly from where they were in mid-January.  We looked at a couple of studies in early February that suggested we could be very close to a multi-week low, but they didn't quite trigger as prices recovered more quickly than they "should" have.  That leaves us without much of a bias for a multi-month time frame.