Never let it be said the market isn't interesting. Twice in the past four days stocks have been pushed to the brink of collapse, and twice the bulls have been able to avoid careening over the cliff.... with today's rebound effort being particularly solid on the heels of not-surprisingly good GDP growth. Advertisement Today's Top 10 Small Cap Stocks - Dynamically Updated List This list will continuously scan and rank small cap stocks throughout the trading day. Find realtime trading opportunities using our SmartScan and Trade Triangle technology to uncover the next big stock under $10 to make major moves. View the top 10 small cap stocks for today. Advertisement As always though, there's more to the story. Much like Tuesday's bounce effort, Thursday's rally away from the edge of the cliff was made on notably lower volume. Oh, it was more than the volume we saw with Tuesday's bounce, but it was still weaker than the volume we've seen with the recent pullbacks. If the rally is going to achieve escape velocity and bust through some key ceilings, it's going to need to do a lot more work, and it's going to need to need a lot more people to help in the effort. I'll show you what we're talking about in a moment. First, with the Super Bowl coming up, I thought we'd have a little fun with it today. I also want to show you what I was seeing with our open trades - Digital River and MicroSemi - yesterday when we mentioned both were due for a sharp rebound. (Both did end up bouncing firmly today, so...) Yes, You CAN Make That Bet I'm sure at least some of you have already seen at least something like this, but we figured it was too juicy and too amazing to not touch on here. In simplest terms, have you seen some of the things you can bet on with the Super Bowl? I'm not talking about the spread on the game's score, or even the over/under on the total number of points scored. I'm talking about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the game, how it's played, and are completely arbitrary. There are probably a couple dozen of these nutty bets the bookmakers may allow you to put real money on, but the three craziest I've seen so far are: How many times will Archie Manning be shown? The over/under is just one, which seems crazy to me, considering he's something of a hero, he has two sons in the NFL, one of which will be playing in the big game. It's just too much of a cool story to not play up. Will any member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers be shirtless during their (halftime) performance? The odds favor "yes", though the payout so far is rather weak. If Renee Fleming wears gloves when she starts singing US National Anthem, what color will they be? Red is the favorite color so far, though white's a close second. Between these crazy questions and the buzz surrounding the television commercials that will be airing during the game, it's easy to forget there's actually a sporting event going on too. On that note... As of the last look, Denver is favored by two points. Sounds about right, but if we had to make a bet, we'd bet on the Broncos topping that two point spread. Bingo! We didn't have time or room to get into it yesterday, but in Wednesday's newsletter we suggested both of our open trades right now, Digital River (DRIV) and MicroSemi (MSCC), were poised for a bullish move this week... as in today. Well, we got it. Yes, most stocks were up today, so finding a winner wasn't that big of a deal. In the case of MSCC and DRIV, however, the bounces were oversized bullish moves. Let's just take a closer look at each to see how the reversal moves were set up. For MicroSemi, Thursday's bounce was good for more than 2.0%. That still hasn't carried MSCC above the 200-day moving average line (green) I like for all my trades to be above. But, it's a pretty good poke, and the stock's still in the hunt for such a move. What made me think a rebound was in the cards following last Friday's post-earnings plunge? For starters, it was a bit goofy from the get-go. The market actually started out quite bullish that day, and THEN decided to be more and more bearish as the day wore on. Even on that day, though, the buyers were pushing back off the low before the closing bell rang. It had all the markings of a capitulation day. Things may have felt a little scary on Wednesday when MicroSemi was knocking on the door of lower lows again, but the volume behind that bearish retest was very weak. Between the capitulation day last week and the fact that the sellers have been unable to beat it down any further, I have to assume we're in a net-bullish environment, even without any real evidence of it. Still, I'd really like to see MSCC move above the $24.00 mark before getting too comfortable. There's not been any major news from or about MicroSemi since Thursday's earnings numbers. Ditto for Digital River... sort of, but sort of not. This thing got a pretty poor start out of the gate after we jumped in back on January 18th. It looks like the last of that weakness was washed out yesterday, however. On Wednesday we saw a very tall bar, with a high well above the open, and we saw a low well below the open, and we saw a close right at the open. It's a pattern called a doji, and far more often than not it marks a transition from one trend into a different one. See, reversals tend to form when indecision and volatility are both high. That's definitely what we saw from DRIV yesterday, and more important, the bulls followed through today with more than a 3% jump. As nice as today's jump was, I'll sleep much better at night when Digital River shares are back above the ceiling around $19.00. We've seen a couple of recent news items from Digital River lately, but nothing I think you absolutely have to see. As for any new trades, I think we can safely tell you there's not going to be anything new added this week. I will tell you, however, we've put Quicksilver Resources (KWK) on our watchlist. I'm also quickly becoming a fan of Peoples Bancorp (PEBO) and PICO Holdings (PICO). We'll take more detailed looks at those potential picks when and if the time comes. Not Impressed Actually, there's not a lot of new stuff to say about the market today. Thursday's action was a continuation of the bullish reversal effort we started on Tuesday, making Wednesday's weakness just a temporary break from the reversal effort. The difference between today and Tuesday is, we made a higher high today. That's good, and based on what we've seen so far, I can see the S&P 500 forging ahead to meet the ceiling that's forming around 1819 where the 20-day moving average line and the 50-day moving average line are converging. Take a look. Problem is, I still just don't see the market moving any higher than that. See, the undertow remains decidedly bearish. I've talked to you before about the number of advancers versus the number of decliners we see for any given day. We've also talked to you about the amount of bearish volume versus the amount of bullish volume the market doles out on any given day. We've even shown you the chart of this data. So, we won't get into the theoretical discussion again. We'll just remind you that the volume data and the advancer/decliner data paint a much clearer picture of things than a quick glance at the indices can. With that in mind, here's the updated chart of the advancer/decliner data and the up-volume/down-volume data... for the NYSE. It comes as no surprise that the chart was more than a little bearish on Thursday of Friday of last week, and Monday and Wednesday of this week. What I find so troubling, though, is that Tuesday's and Thursday's up-volume wasn't really all that high... nowhere near as high as the bearish volume was on the negative days. The same for the advancer/decliner data. Now, that's alarming, but things get a little more alarming when you overlay the trends lines - the moving averages - of the data. As you can see on the chart below, the volume trend has been bearish since the 24th when the down-volume moving average moved above the up-volume moving average. The advancer trend line still isn't quite above the decliner trend line, but we're about one bad day away from that scale tipping in favor of the bears too. Point being, we're not quite past the point of no return yet, but in the grand scheme of things, we're getting close. One more bad day could do the trick. Today and Tuesday didn't really do that much to stop the market's bleeding. You know what though? Anything can happen at any time, no matter which direction the clues are pointing. We'll reassess things tomorrow. Talk to you then.