Happy Monday, one and all. We hope everyone had a great weekend. Of course, though the market welcomed you back, it didn't do so with a lot of zeal. We'll look at it in a moment, as we typically do, but first I want to show you a chart that just might give us all reason to pause before we talk (or assume) we actually know anything about what the Fed's going to do next. Oh... Right Have you ever gone back and read anything written by the financial media a year or more ago? Sometimes it's shocking just how wrong - and irrelevant - journalists can be. Yet, at the time, we tend to give a great deal of credence to most of the big, splashy news stories that investment writers write about and the gurus' predictions journalists love to tout. The big "so what" is, sometimes ideas are batted around so much they're presumed to be accurate, and meaningful. This is rarely the way things really are, though. Case in point? Just on a whim I did a search for some major news sites' most read stories from one year ago today. Take a look. We're Already in a Bear Market; You Just Don't Realize It Yet Monica Lewinsky joins Twitter: Why that's bad news for Hillary Clinton 2016 Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO): Why You Should Sell This Stock So how'd the prognosticators do? Not too good. Bear market? Not quite. Almost to the day that article was written the market started to rebound, and never looked back until December when it was up 10%. Even with the recent turbulence, the S&P 500 is still up 7% since then. Nope. The last time the name "Monica Lewinsky" has even been given a second thought was then, just to note she had a Twitter account. In the meantime, Hillary remains the frontrunner. Not only did Cisco not lose any more ground then, four months later it was up 26%, and it's still up more than 20% since the bearish call. The moral of the story is, just because something sounds relevant, accurate, and meaningful doesn't mean it is. Now, the reason I wanted to give you this quick lesson was to show you what I'm about to show you. You know how over the past several months we (myself included) have had this mindset of "not if, but when" regarding the timing of the next interest rate hike. Well, maybe we (again, me included) should do a little less guessing and a lot more listening and following. The chart below - from MarketWatch - plots the Fed Funds rate actual value in red. The dashed lines represent the predicted Fed Funds rate at any given time. Almost needless to say, we've been counting on a string of rate increases since late-2008, and we've yet to get the first one. Maybe, just maybe, we should quit trying to predict it and instead just wait for the Fed to do what it's going to do. Eventually, the market's going to get back to its economically-founded and fundamentally-supported values. I can't help but wonder how much time has been lost and how many opportunities have been squandered by folks trying to outguess everyone else when what we all should have been doing is paying more attention to charts and fundamentals. Giving credit where it's due, John Monroe is the only guy I know of who's not only kept a level head when it comes to doing the interest rate dance. Better still, he's the only guy I know who's successfully steered people away from that trap, instead keeping them focused on what was really important. You know, of course, this still won't keep us from talking about what's at least suspected to be in the cards. Right now the Fed Funds futures say there's virtually no chance the Fed will raise interest rates this month [it's not a normal decision month, but they can impose a rate hike in emergency situations], and there's now only a 27% chance the Fed Funds rate will edge to 0.5% on December. In fact, the odds don't call for a rate hike until June of next year, when there's a 41% chance it will bump up to 0.5% then, yet a 34% chance it will still be at 0.25% at that time. I'm still not sure those odds are good enough to bet on.... especially seeing the chart MarketWatch served up today. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say the Elite Opportunity's John Monroe was right. While everybody else was debating whether the Fed could or would or should raise interest rates over the past several weeks, he was out there doing what he was supposed to be doing, which is making money for EO readers rather than getting into a pointless philosophical argument. If you find you're getting analysis-paralysis in this environment, now's the time to become an Elite Opportunity member. Still Not Convinced As far as the market goes, yeah, it was up today, but it's not like it cleared any great hurdles. I'll show you the daily chart of the NASDAQ. I don't even want to fool with the S&P 500; there's just no point. As you can see, the composite gained a bit today, but it still hasn't popped above the 200-day moving average line (green). And even if it does, I still see some resistance right above there served up by a couple of other key technical lines. The VXN is also trending lower, but has yet to break under a key floor around 13.5. Geez this is maddening. Hey, by the way.... a few of you have asked where our charts of the S&P 500's earning history and projections have gone to (the ones with the trailing and forward-looking P/E levels). We've decided to move that data and the commentary that goes along with it over to the Elite Opportunity. That's not to say we'll never talk about those things here in the end-of-day newsletter again (like we did here), but the bulk of those updates we'll likely be exclusive to the EO. Here's how to get it.