Good Friday to you. Although the media is attributing today's market's strength to Spain's reform measures as they prepare for the ever popular bailout package, the reality is today marks a 'quadruple witching' event, with quarterly settlements and expiration of four different types of September equity futures and options contracts. That's pretty much the main reason why volatility has picked up across the major indexes over the last few days. The end result however still isn't much change since Bernanke threw his last lifeline out there last week. We'll see where things close at the end of the day. I will note the NASDAQ Composite technically established a new 52 week high today. When I say technically, I don't mean charting analysis, I simply mean it created a new high by literally a point or two. It's hardly a breakout while the other three major indexes, the DOW, NDX and S&P, just continue to grind in a very tight range. I suspect this market is going to start making its bet on third quarter earnings soon by either moving higher from current levels or moving lower. From a charting perspective, we'll reiterate everything still appears bullish on a near-term basis. Weekly and monthly charts are still bullishly intact and the daily chart still hasn't provided any clues of a downturn in the days or weeks ahead. Yesterday ended up proving our recent analysis of playing contrarian is still the preferred strategy for short-term trading. Once the indexes took out their short-term support levels on the hourly charts, they all moved back up in tandem with the NASDAQ leading today. Our stance of buying the weakness and selling the highs continues to prove profitable. JCP Goes Nuts AND Gets Whacked, All in Two Days We've got some follow up commentary today on an interesting issue that should give you some ammo to work with for some potentially nice longer-term returns in an old idea. We received an inquiry from a reader yesterday asking us our thoughts on J. C. Penney's (JCP) recent yo-yo activity. We published a fairly controversial newsletter edition on August 10th titled, "A Dusty Old Antique Can Be Worth a LOT of Money". We suggested JCP looked very attractive as a potential turnaround candidate. The 100 year old retailer hadn't been able to do much right in recent years even though the stock artificially did pretty well. While the rest of the retailing world adjusted for the times and adopted new retailing strategies to improve corporate performance, JCP was one of those old legacy models that on the surface just didn't seem to care. The stock finally caved in until about the middle of July. With the employment of their new CEO, Ron Johnson, former Apple (AAPL) head of retail operations, we pointed out a few key things to keep an eye out with on JCP going forward. We suggested watching for ingeniously new marketing campaigns, innovative product display, store layouts or just an overall different feel when you walk into one of their stores. At the time, JCP was trading at roughly $23.34 per share. Since then, the stock ran to a high three days ago of just over $32.50 per share representing a gain of almost 40%. A 40% gain in just over a month is ridiculous considering almost every other stock in the universe has only yielded single digit gains at best since then. Again, you must be opportunistic in this market and take profits like that when they stare you in the face. There's a tremendous amount of volatility these days with many individual issues, so don't let the rug get pulled out from under you when you're up that much. Case in point... the reason shares of JCP went crazy to the upside this week at first was because CEO, Ron Johnson, updated the investing community on his new retail strategy to reinvent the way consumers shop. His strategy is to turn JCP locations into a collection of branded boutiques, eventually having 100 shops in stores and change 25 of them every year, Johnson said during an investor presentation. Basically a mall within the store. Interesting concept. He also mentioned their new "shops" are doing better than the rest of the store. In short, investors loved it snapping up shares of JCP enough to take the stock to that $32.50 level mentioned above. Well, shortly after, Ron Johnson came out and said, "look, this is going to take time". Basically, Rome wasn't built in a day. Following that statement, shares of JCP tanked to its current level of just over $26 per share, still up from our initial entry. However, it's our opinion that this week's highly volatile activity in JCP's stock was nothing but a bunch of market maker hocus pocus playing with the investing public looking to pick up shares of JCP on the cheap, likely for funds looking to get in. Here's why... I've included a daily chart of JCP for your review. The chart goes back to that August 10th day when we suggested the idea. Look at the 25X5 DMA (purple line) here. The stock was taken down perfectly to that 25X5 level on the heels of Johnson's legitimate cautious statement. The 25X5 DMA in JCP's chart here is a very logical support level. Additionally, the stock retraced exactly 50% of its move from the July low to this week's high. Coincidence? I really don't think so. It was a perfect level to freak investors out and still keep the stock intact. If you believe JCP's turnaround effort is nothing short of pioneering new retail strategies, this may end up inevitably proving to be a nice secondary entry for those who didn't participate initially. Time will tell, but my bet's on Ron Johnson to continue to get things turned around. Again, 40% was a gift, but now that the stock is down around $26 and change, it's worth a shot from here. Of course, never let a gain turn into a loss and protect your downside by employing a logical stop loss you're comfortable with should our analysis over the long haul prove out to be wrong. I for one don't think we'll be wrong on this idea, however, nobody has a crystal ball. Have an excellent weekend, we'll see you next week.