Welcome to the weekend, everybody. On the off-chance you've forgotten, Monday is Labor Day, so the U.S. markets will be closed. It also means most of you will have a three day weekend. Enjoy it. Before you get your weekend plans underway, though, let's take one last look at the market and some key information for this week. That way we can hit the ground running come Tuesday. New Pick First things first. On Wednesday we told you the telecom sector was shaping up as a buy-worthy industry for the last third of the year. We didn't have one ready to step into at the time, but we've made a decision on one in the meantime - let's add Verizon (VZ) to the portfolio, where it will join AES Corp. (AES) and JC Penney (JCP). There's no particular catalyst or special situation I've got my eye on with Verizon. After looking closer at all of the major telecom options, weighing the fundamentals and the technicals, Verizon just looks best-positioned to take advantage of the bullish undertow for telecom. From a fundamental perspective, VZ is trading at 11.1 times its trailing earnings and is valued at a forward P/E of 12.8. Analysts say per-share earnings should grow from $2.84 last year to $3.55 this year (+25%) to $3.88 next year (+9.3%). Revenue is projected to grow 4.5% this year and expand by 2.8% next year. Those are fine... about all you could expect from a telecom company. Just for the record though, Verizon is more apt to beat estimates than not. The more compelling aspect of Verizon right now is the chart. Simply put, it's still in a long-term uptrend, just starting to wiggle its way out of a short-term pullback and aiming for the upper boundary of the long-term bullish trend. Our chart explains it all much better than words can. VZ has been on the rise for several years. Within this primary trend we've seen a couple of major secondary rallies (traced in red). After testing the long-term support line (blue, dashed) repeatedly over the past several months, it finally looks like the bulls are pushing up and off that line. Yeah, the stock soared then stumbled a month ago in the wake of news from Windstream (WIN) that it was converting most of itself into a REIT. Once the market realized this doesn't drastically affect - for better of worse - Verizon's operation, the stock peeled back. The bigger bullish trend never faltered, however, and seems to be picking up steam this week. We're willing to take a shot. That's it. We know it's not sexy or riveting. Here's a little trading tip for you.... most "sexy" and "riveting" (or news-based or speculation-based) trades don't pan out. I've made far more money in stocks most people weren't interested in at the time than I have in trading stocks the whole world was watching at the time. By the way, the two big secondary runups we saw in 2012 and 2013 were both on the order of 20%. So, VZ is no stranger to big (relatively) moves. While we'd normally go fishing for bigger and faster movers, there aren't too many of those kinds of trades available right now. Maybe after a significant pullback we can go fishing for more aggressive trades. Whatever the case, we're going to keep Verizon on a short leash. We'll get a mental stop out to you sometime next week. Consumers Are Doing Just Fine In case you missed it, consumer spending actually fell 0.1% in July. It's not a big number, but that's not the problem. Consumer spending is one of those data points that just doesn't contract unless there's some sort of structural problem. The media went ballistic, of course, citing the weak spending last month as a sign of impending doom. After all, since 2/3 of our economy is consumerism and those shoppers are spending less, the unusual slump can only be the first step in a march off of an economic cliff, right? Ehhh, wrong. While the dip in consumer spending would normally be something of a red flag, one month does not make or break a trend. The dip also means very little in the context of everything else, like this week's consumer confidence data. As it turns out, consumer confidence is quite strong. The Conference Board's consumer confidence level hit a multi-year high of 92.5 for this month, and the Michigan Sentiment Index ended August at 82.5. That was close to a multi-year high. Both measures are still in solid uptrends too. Point being, just because consumers kept their purse strings drawn a little tighter than usual in July isn't a reason to assume the worst. Sometimes you have to give the economy a little room to adjust. Don't Take the Bait Believe it or not, the S&P 500 closed at a record high close today. More than that, it closed above the key 2000 level. Gotta be honest though.... I'm not impressed. Things can get very squirrelly in front of holiday weekends. Today's volume was pretty thin, and it's entirely possible stocks were allowed to move higher today just because there were no sellers who felt like putting up any kind of fight. This isn't to say Friday should be dismissed. Where we start again next week is where we finished at the end of this week. When traders come back and see the weekly close above 2000, there may be a little confidence boost coming into play. We still contend the market's overbought and overvalued, however, and it's going to take a lot for the market to shrug that off. Conversely, it won't take much at all to trip the market up. Just for the record, we're still bearishly biased, if for no other reason than the calendar. September is historically the worst month of the year for the NASDAQ, with an average loss of 0.7%. It's not a particularly great month for the S&P 500 either. You know what though? There's not a thing we can do about the 50/50 proposition at this time. We'll just have to see which side of the fence stocks end up falling on next week. Did You See? Last but not least, did you see the white paper Staffing 360 Solutions (STAF) published this morning? Just as a refresher, Staffing 360 Solutions was the IT staffing firm we presented to you back in May. The core of the story was, STAF was at the intersection of two opportunities. One of them was the growing cybercrime spree, which we've talked about a great deal of late (making it an official focal point in Thursday's newsletter). The other opportunity is one we haven't talked about much, which is the defragmentation of staffing industry. There are literally thousands of staffing agencies in the United States. We need them all, but all of them working independently is inefficient. By bringing them together, effectiveness is improved and costs are lowered. The hard part is organizing their unions. That's where Staffing 360 Solutions comes in. The folks running the show for STAF are experts at mergers and extracting synergies. That's why its growth-by-acquisition strategy is such a big deal. While we knew there was opportunity in consolidating some of these staffing firms, we could never really put a clear figure or framework around it. Thanks to the white paper published by Staffing 360 Solutions today, now we can. I've read about half of the paper so far and it's good stuff. Whether you're a STAF shareholder or not, it's an interesting read just because it really does appear to be a major opportunity. Here's the report. Remember, the markets are closed on Monday, so we won't be publishing. Everyone have a great - and safe - holiday weekend. We'll be back at it on Tuesday.