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Welcome back folks. We hope those of you who took a little extra time off last week enjoyed your R&R and family time. It's Monday though, and not only is ittime to get back in the saddle, it's the first day of the last month of the year. This is where things get interesting, and we all have to be on our game from here on out.

One of the current hot buttons, of course, is the prospect of a so-called Santa Claus rally, which is broadly in reference to December's usual gains. There's a more specific definition of a Santa Claus rally - the usual bullishness we see between Christmas day and New Year's day. For the purposes of our discussion though, we'll use the term's broad definition ... as a December rally.

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We hope everyone's Tuesday was a good one, even if it was a slow one for stocks. You can really sense there's a mental countdown to Thanksgiving going on here. Today's action was more lethargic than yesterday's, and I've got a feeling tomorrow's trading is going to be even slower that today's. Ironically, the most explosive day of this week is apt to be Friday's half-session. How's that? Because a lot of people who would normally be working on a weekday are going to be off from work, and rather than braving the shopping malls they're likely to get online and see what's new with the market

Like I explained to you on Monday though, just because there's not a lot of trading action happening this week doesn't mean there's nothing going on worth a closer look. We got a pretty big dose of this "other stuff" today. Let's hit that first before doing what we can do with the market.

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Happy Wednesday folks. We hope day three of the selloff didn't hurt too bad. Though that's the highest number of consecutive losses the S&P 500 has taken since late September, it's still not like we've reached a point where the market can't recover and resume the bigger uptrend. On the other hand, there are a handful of bigger-picture clues telling us the undertow is more bearish than the market appears to be on the surface.

We'll look at those concerning details in a second. First we've got some quick trading business to take care of.

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Welcome to the weekend everybody. We hope you had a good trading week. The market certainly did what it could to do to make things good for you, spurred by some dovish comments from the Fed Chair-elect Janet Yellen.

I could take about how that prod took the market a little higher on Friday, pushing (although straining to do so) the indices into new-high territory. You know that though? I've pretty much beat that horse to death with you guys already, and I'm not going to do it again. When whatever's going to happen finally happens - and we'll know it when we see it - we can talk about it then. Until then, there's not much point in going through the same exercise.

So what do I want to talk about? Something that made my trading success infinitely better, pretty much immediately.

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Happy hump-day, fellow traders. I trust everyone's week has gone well so far. Today's decent gain had to help a little on that front, though I'm still convinced the market's ready to dole out an entire bullish leg of the long-term rally. In fact, there's a good-sized part of me that's even more pessimistic now - after today's runup - that's thinking today could be "the" short-term top. I'll tell you why in a below. The first thing we need to take care of is an update (maybe the next-to-last update) on third quarter's overall earnings, since we opened that can of worms a few weeks ago. Let's just start there.

Q3 Earnings Report Card