Hey folks, how's it going? And, to those of you who were betting the Dow Jones Industrial Average would clear the 20,000 mark before a major setback, you were right. The Dow hit and then pushed past 20,000 today. The $64,000 question: What's next? We've got some thoughts on the matter below, and they might surprise you. Let's take care of today's priority today first though, which is a quick look at news for one of our Featured Stocks... CobalTech Mining (BNCIF, CVE:CSK). Just as a quick reminder, CobalTech Mining is the outfit developing a cobalt mine in (and this is for real) Cobalt, Ontario. The locale got its name because -- no surprise -- there's a lot of cobalt there just waiting to be dug up. Great, but why cobalt? Because you own at least one thing that has cobalt in it. Cobalt is used to make the anodes and cathodes in laptop and cell phone batteries. Cobalt is also used to make the battery packs that power Tesla vehicles. Oh, and each Tesla electric vehicle requires about 50 pounds of cobalt. Multiply that by Tesla's plans to make 500,000 cars per year within a couple years, and what you've got is a very serious supply constraint. And the supply constraint is going to get worse before it gets better. As InvestorIntel posed it last year: "Overall, cobalt demand is projected to grow from 87,383 tonnes to 113,725 tonnes between 2014 and 2018. Cobalt supply is projected to grow from 91,577 tonnes to 100,778 tonnes over this same time frame. Rechargeable batteries and superalloys comprise 46% and 18% respectively of the total refined cobalt demand." The end result is a cobalt price that's rallied 50% over the course of the past year, and appears to be accelerating. Point being, there's not enough of the stuff to go around. You can glean some of the details on that situation right here in our first look back on December 12th. Fast forward to this week. The company just announced it was acquiring a whole new slew of cobalt properties. Per the press release posted yesterday afternoon: "CobalTech is pleased to announce that it has acquired additional cobalt interests by purchasing eight (8) properties in the Province of Quebec. Each property is centered on an anomaly listed and verified in the government mineral occurrence database. The eight (8) new cobalt properties in Quebec, Canada are advantageously located for synergy with the Company's Ontario located cobalt properties. They total an area of 1535 hectares of prospective ground where past sampling have returned values ranging from 0.1% to 0.71% cobalt. Cobalt commonly being a secondary metal or by-product, these anomalies been selected for their high Co ratios with respect to total metal contents." Being aggressive now and adding new prospects is a savvy, correct move here. There's not an obvious supply/demand imbalance yet, but there's little doubt it's brewing, and the consequence is inevitable. We continue to think BNCIF (or CSK for Canadian investors) is one of the market's top speculations. As far as the overall market goes, yeah, the Dow Jones Industrial Average finally got over the hump. It also stayed over the hump, which is the more surprising feat to me. One persistently bullish day doesn't mandate a follow-on rally though. We're still very concerned the market is just trying to lure people in only to kick-start a painful wave of profit-taking. Gotta be honest though.... that seems to be a minority view. Most of the rhetoric I've seen today is bullish, suggesting stocks had been trapped under 20,000, but now that the jailbreak's underway the rally is going to last. It's as if valuations are irrelevant, and they're not relevant... right up until the point they are. Once they do become relevant again, they can become relevant in a most painful way. Most investors never learn. More on that in a second. What I want to do first is respond to a study done by CNBC and posted at CNBC.com that looks at what the market does after it crosses an X,000 level. Conclusion? It's a bullish event. What was so odd (to the point of being funny) was what CNBC considered notably bullish. On average, once the Dow clears X,000, it's up 0.09% a week later, up 0.73% a month later, and up 3.88% a quarter later. In the one-month timeframe, the Dow made gains in 14 out of the past 18 times it moved past a level ending in 000. Sounds encouraging, right? Here's the thing... the market is supposed to go higher. It was built to move upward. It's unusual when it moves lower. The CBNC study doesn't exactly say there's any kind of a meaningful 'edge' when you jump in following the move above X,000. In fact, I did a little math myself, and found that even when the Dow doesn't move above a X,000 mark, the one-week gain is about 0.09%, and the one month gain is around 0.73%, and the one-quarter gain is near 3.88%. In other words, maybe it's not the move above X,000 that's so catalytic, but the simple fact that stocks just tend to move up rather than down. Now, just to double-check my suspicion I drew a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average going back more than a decade. I looked at it.... a lot. While I'd be the first to say the blue chip index can and does rally well after hurdling a X,000 level, I can't visually see that such events are any more bullish for the Dow than any other bullishness it musters when X,000 levels aren't in play. (Click on the chart for the full-sized image.) I will contend, however, that the '000 values do tend to play important support and resistance roles. In fact, as I was doing all this work, it struck me... if anything, it's the media's chatter about the importance of X,000 that makes those lines so important - and actionable - for shareholders. Regardless, given the lack of clear evidence a cross of 20,000 should be bullish for the market -in addition to the fact that stocks are pushing their valuation limits [remember, Trump hasn't actually done anything to improve corporate profits yet] -plus the fact that the Dow is up 10% just since early December, we have our doubts about how much follow-through this rally will muster. There's a very specific reason we have our doubts though. We talk about it from time to time, but haven't talked about it much lately mostly because there was nothing to talk about. It's worth talking about today though - there was only minimal volume behind today's historic move. Given the size and scope of the jump, there should have been a massive inflow of volume as newcomers jumped into the advance. They just never showed up. Perhaps this rally isn't as compelling as it seems like it would be on the surface. Maybe my hesitance isn't merited. We'll see. I just know (1) the market is overbought and (2) the market usually performs poorly in the February after a Presidential inaugurations. Presumably, the euphoria is soon replaced by the reality that the new Commander in Chief can't do everything in a month. I can see that happening this time around too. Like I said, we'll see. We'll show you (again) the chart of the market's usual post-inauguration response tomorrow or Friday too.