And so it begins. I'm not talking about the Janet Yellen era as head of the Federal Reserve, which could have arguably kicked off yesterday with her first press conference in that role. I'm talking about the NCAA men's basketball tournament - aka "March Madness". We're only a handful of games into it, and it already looks like some brackets are going to be busted. I suppose that's why they actually play the games. Advertisement 7 Reasons This Company is Poised to Triple your Money Goldman Sachs has ranked e-cigarettes as one of the disruptive technologies most likely to make millions for investors in the months and years ahead. Find out which rapidly growing company could be THE investment of 2014. Click Here For The Full Report... Advertisement Not that you asked, but I'm picking Florida over Louisville in the final game, and I'm predicting the Gators will have to beat Michigan State to get to get there, while Louisville will need to top Wisconsin to face Florida two weekends from now. I'll warn you now though, I pick stocks a heck of a lot better than I pick basketball teams. Case in point? Frontier Communications. To the Moon! Obviously I had a good feeling Frontier Communications (FTR) was going to behave bullishly when we recommended it to you back on March 5th, but I'll be the first to confess I didn't see it running as quickly as it did. As of today, we're up about 12% on the trade. No, it's not en explosive triple-digit winner, but for a lower-risk trade like this one, 12% in a couple of weeks is a solid move. The big reason FTR rallied so well today is being attributed to its announcement this morning that it was deepening its partnership with solar power company Crius Energy. The gist of the news is, Frontier will be offering solar panel systems to its telecom customers in New York, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. The theory seems to be if a customer knows and likes Frontier as a telecom service provider, it won't be a great leap for Frontier to become their utility provider as well. I personally don't see it as an immediate game-changer, but it could bear fruit over the long haul (and it will cost the company next to nothing to get the ball rolling). The market priced the long-term impact into the stock's price in one fell swoop today, however. I'm not going to complain. Let's just raise our mental stop on the trade to $5.15. Astec (ASTE) also reached new multi-year highs today, though it wasn't spurred by any news. Genesco (GCO) and Cooper (COO) both had good days today too, and had each not made wild bullish surges a few days ago, they'd both have hit new multi-month highs today as well. Here's where the portfolio is as of Thursday's close. I mentioned this to you a few weeks ago, but it bears repeating now - I'm going to do my best to hang on to trades for as long as I can, and rather than locking in a short-term 20% gain, we're going to see if we can get some 50% gainers or even a couple of 100% gainers by holding positions for a few weeks, or even a few months. That's why we're still holding Silicon Image now rather than booking our 22% profit there. This stock more than doubled its price over the course of 2010, and the setup then looks an awful lot like the setup we saw a few days ago that got us into the stock in the first place. I don't want to miss out on a big gain just because we didn't exercise enough patience. The thing is, even with more patience I doubt I'll be able to catch up to the performance of John Monroe over at the SmallCap Network Elite Opportunity. Here's where his picks stand right now. And those are just the open positions - you should see some of the scores on the picks he's closed out over the past year. Ugh. Oh well. Like they say, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. You can even join the Elite Opportunity for two weeks at no charge, if you're interested in really spicing up your portfolio and want to see if the EO is the best way of doing so. Here's the deal, or cut and paste this link. https://www.smallcapnetwork.com/?vmpd_ckstr[click_track]=Newsletter&vmpd_ckstr_redirect=/pages/SCNEO/v1/ Get Ready - Stocks Are Getting Squeezed You probably don't need me to tell you the market's been stuck in a rut for the past couple of weeks. I do think I need to tell you, however, the walls are closing in on stocks, and that could mean something big to all of us soon. Using the S&P 500 as our proxy (though the NASDAQ and Dow charts look about the same), you can see there's a ceiling at 1883 and a floor at 1840. That's where the S&P 500 peaked and bottomed most recently, respectively, though those highs and lows aren't the only reasons we're seeing support and resistance at those levels now. The upper Bollinger band is now at 1886, and falling, while the lower Bollinger band and the 50-day moving average line (purple) are both at 1833 right now, and will be at 1840 soon enough. You can even see there's a recently-framed falling resistance line and rising support line [both plotted in yellow] putting some new pressure on the S&P 500. Take a look. So what? The "so what" is, the market's getting boxed in here, with the strength of the floor and ceiling both growing. Now, the seemingly-logical interpretation of the chart and all of its key lines would be that the stronger the support and resistance gets, the tougher it is for the market to snap itself out of this rut. And, to tell the truth, there's some soundness to that theory. As too many years of trading experience are saying in the back of my mind though, I believe getting squeezed between this much support and resistance is actually going to spark a rather sharp move once either side of the sideways channel is broken. Think of it like a balloon getting too full. You can blow more and more air into a balloon, and though each puff barely even makes a visible impact on the size of the balloon, you know when too much is too much. It only takes that list miniscule breath to push the balloon beyond its limit, and POP! You unleash a lot of energy in an instant. Yeah, well, in the same sense, the market's building up a lot of energy as it gets squeezed here, and sooner than later (I suspect sooner) the market's balloon is going to pop and absolutely hurl stocks one direction or the other. As the saying going, periods of high volatility are followed by periods of low volatility, and vice versa. We're now in a low volatility phase, so.... Which direction are we going to move? That's the million dollar question. Both sides of the table have a pretty good case right now. Neither side of the table is winning, however, which is why the market hasn't budged in about three weeks. Don't be fooled though - the move is coming. My point is, while it would be easy to fall asleep here while stocks seem to just be drifting sideways, this is exactly the time to stand ready to trade once the ball gets rolling. Once it gets rolling, it's likely to stay in motion for a while. We'll talk more about the directional clues tomorrow and/or early next week. For now, there's too much basketball to watch to worry about a stagnant market.