Good afternoon folks, and welcome to the weekend. And for those of you who also happen to be members of the Under the Radar Movers newsletter, you're getting the weekend started on a high note. As disgusted as it may make non-members feel to hear URM subscribers nailed down another big winner, that's exactly what they did today. The Under the Radar Movers long-term portfolio exited its Rudolph Technologies (RTEC) position on Friday for a gain of 54%. It had only been in the long-term portfolio since May. I suppose it's that little detail that merits an explanation. I don't know if we've mentioned this to you before or not, but the URM service is actually two portfolios. One is a long-term portfolio, and the other is a short-term portfolio. Both are maintained, and active. James Brumley and his team manage both portfolios (using completely different strategies, by the way) because he knows all too well there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this game. As the environment changes, so too must your strategy. With two different portfolios, the URM team can always gravitate towards whatever's working best at any given time. Both are run concurrently all the time, but we've been treated to a few more short-term swing trades than usual recently, and a few less long-term ideas than usual, because that's what makes the most sense right now. In any case, what I've really enjoyed about getting the Under the Radar newsletter is Brumley's pragmatic approach. We were talking yesterday about Rudolph Technologies, and though his hope was to hold it for a year or more, he refuses to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. RTEC is overbought and ripe for a pullback that could last a while, and from a risk-vs-reward perspective, getting out now is the right thing today. That 54% gain comes just a few days after the Under the Rader Movers' short-term portfolio locked in a 44% gain on Goldfield (GV), and less than a month after the newsletter locked in a 100% gain on Heat Biologics (HTBX). They don't all do that well, ut not all of them have to. Just a handful of huge winners in any given year can really beef up your bottom line, and that's exactly what the URM team is dishing out. Don't start the new year out doing the same thing you've been doing and expecting different results. Invest in your own success -- get off the sidelines, stop listening to us talk about all the big trades other people are experiencing and start making them for yourself. Here's how. As far as the market goes, hopefully nobody is too surprised about today's weakness. We're headed into a weekend in an overbought situation, and though there's supposed to be a Santa Claus rally here, I think most traders recognize there's not a lot of room left for upside. The path of least resistance is downward. But, it would take a break under 2250 for the S&P 500 to truly move past the tipping point. Oddly enough, the VIX didn't move higher today. Maybe that's because today was a triple-witching day, but I'm not entirely convinced of that. Everything else continues to behave unpredictably, as traders still aren't quite sure about what to make of the odds of several rate hikes planned for the coming year. Yields were up, but the U.S. dollar fell; the two should more or less be moving in tandem. Crude oil and gold were more up -- and by quite a bit -- on the greenback's weakness, but such a big move wasn't merited by the modest lull from the dollar. Bonds fell accordingly, and so did stocks, which makes sense.... money was migrating to gold from somewhere. That "somewhere" was from stocks and/or bonds. With all of that being said, we're going to go back to an idea we've posed a few times of late, but can't reiterate enough. That is, the normal relationships we see among all these things aren't holding up right now. There's more speculation doing the driving at this time, and it's less about fundamentals. That presents something of a problem because something has to give eventually. The higher the dollar flies, the worse it becomes for stocks. The higher rates rise, the better it is for the dollar. The more the dollar rises, the worse it is for gold and oil. The lower gold and oil fall, the more people want stocks. The more people want stocks, the less they need bonds... You get the idea. All of these factors can find a healthy equilibrium, but they've not found it yet. They spent the last few months doing things they theoretically shouldn't have done, so now we're unwinding the oddities. We're not done doing so yet, though. And, we still contend gold and bonds are poised to rebound, where stocks are the most vulnerable. Something else we'll reiterate.... a weaker dollar would solve a lot of problems right now. It would not only help U.S. companies that sell goods overseas, it would help U.S. companies that sell goods to U.S. consumers by making prices of foreign goods more expensive. A falling dollar would also boost the price of oil a heck of a lot more than OPEC's cuts ever could, which would not only restore the energy sector's profitability, but would also create new jobs in the U.S. And yet, here we are being forced to raise rates to fight budding inflation, which is putting upward pressure on the dollar rather than downward pressure. That's technically bad for stocks AND bonds AND commodities at this point, so we'll all have to collectively decide the lesser of two evils. It'll be interesting to see what traders choose (and hopefully they decide at least one type of instrument is worth owning). We only make the point again so you know not to assume the next several weeks will be typical, or behave rationally. Were there not a downside consequence of printing money, it would make complete sense to do so now to devalue the dollar. Indeed, it may be worth the consequence of doing so, if we get the benefit of doing so. Even without that help, however, we have a feeling the dollar is indeed going to move lower despite rate hikes planned through 2017. We suspect the interest rate increases are already baked in. That's a discussion we'll have to save for another time though. For now, let's just all focus on having a great weekend. We'll be back at it on Monday.