Welcome to the weekend, folks, and it should be a good one if you're a basketball fan. All four of my Final Four picks (Florida, Michigan State, Wisconsin, and Louisville) are still alive, though Florida - my predicted tournament winner - had a pretty tough time with UCLA last night. And, Louisville faces a surprisingly tough Johnny-come-lately team in Kentucky tonight. It's going to be interesting. Anyway, I didn't come here to talk to you about basketball and brackets. I came to talk about stocks and the market... which fortunately for you, I'm much better at than I am at handicapping sports. Let's open with the most important matter to you and me right now - the market's current direction. Let's just say we're not impressed by today's gains. Yeah, the S&P 500 managed to close about 0.5% higher, which isn't too bad given the environment. But, all it took was a brush of the 20-day moving average line today to send the index back-pedaling. And, I'll point out how once again the gain was made on pretty pathetic volume. Ditto for the NASDAQ Composite. It was rallying pretty well at one point today, but peeled back well off its highs for Friday to end the session with a meager 0.1% gain. The volume behind this gain was pretty weak too, and it still looks like the VXN is doing everything it can to continue walking higher. I'm not going to bother showing you a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, because it tells the exact same story... the bulls are hanging on for dear life, but the bears seem unable or unwilling to deal the proverbial death blow. In other words, we're still caught in the middle. At least we know what to look for, however - the S&P 500's 20-day moving average line at 1863 is a problem that needs to be taken care before we can even think of being bullish in a more meaningful way. Even then, the ceiling at 1883 is firming up. Having had some time to think it over, I think I'm going to lower my absolute floor for the S&P 500 from 1840 to 1834. The 1840 area was a big support area a couple of weeks ago and a ceiling a couple of months ago, but with the 50-day moving average being right below that mark, there's no reason to take any chances. Any move under 1834 is very unlikely to be halted until the S&P 500 reaches levels well below there. And yes, given how the rally that started just yesterday fizzled out today, I'm still leaning bearishly here... in the short term. The bulls simply don't have any get-up-and-go. I just need to see the bulls completely throw in the towel first before putting my money where my mouth is. I know this waiting game is getting really old. Patience is a trading discipline that pays big dividends though. And don't worry... things will get rocking and rolling soon enough. Portfolio Update - Raising Stops As well as the market did today, I'm pleased to be able to tell you our portfolio did even better. In fact, we made enough progress on Friday that we need to ramp up our stops on a handful of our positions. In no particular order... Not that it's been red hot - or even bullish - since breaking above a major ceiling at $24.90 a month and a half ago, but the past two weeks have convinced me that PICO Holdings (PICO) is above the $24.90 level to stay. If the bears were going to pull the rug out from underneath it, I think we would have seen it by now. Let's place a mental stop at the $25.00 mark. Let's also up our mental stop on Frontier Communications (FTR) to $5.35. I really thought Frontier was going to pull back after stalling around the $5.40 area late last week and early this week after exploding past its ceiling at $5.00 a couple of weeks ago. But, the bulls got back on their horse in the latter part of this week to extend the breakout. Let's take advantage of the move. Of our six positions, FTR is the one I'm most excited about now. I had a pretty good feeling we were due for a breakout after a couple of years of wallowing in its 2011 pullback. All we needed was a nudge past $5.00. Now that we got it, we've got several years and a couple of points worth of gain to make up for. I'm going to try my best to stick with it as long as we possibly reasonably can. Finally, there's no need to add a chart of Cooper Cos. (COO) here, as it really hasn't gone anywhere or done anything all that interesting for the past three weeks. Just as a matter of trading discipline though, let's draw a line in the sand at $128.25. I honestly don't remember if I ever pegged a stop level on Cooper or not, but if I didn't, there ya' go. It's not totally arbitrary - there are a bunch of moving average lines converging around $128.25 right now. Mostly though, I just don't like not having a safety net in place should things turn sour. Amazingly, there's still not been a shred of news from or about any of our current positions. I saw a couple of commentaries about Frontier over at Seeking Alpha that may be worth reading. Just take them both with a grain of salt, as Seeking Alpha is still something of the Wild West of the financial world. This is where our picks are as of today. If you're looking for picks and ideas of a different variety, I thought Chris Vermeulen made some great points about gold today [warning - you may not like what he has to say], and John Udovich took a real good look at electronics and appliance retailer Conn's. Could it be turning around? John shares his thoughts. That's it for today and for this week. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you Monday.