Welcome back from the day off, and welcome to the weekend! We know Friday wasn't a big day for stock trading - it's just the way the holiday fell this year. We've still got a handful of things we want to get through today, however, if only to make sure we're all prepared for next week's action. All the same, you'll find today's edition is a little shorter than the norm just because we don't see any need to make a mountain out of a molehill. No need to tarry.... let's just dig in, beginning with a quick look at the top commentaries posted at the website today. From the Site As John Monroe over at the Elite Opportunity newsletter brilliantly said it today, money never sleeps. Our usual stable of contributors at www.smallcapnetwork.com was just as busy today as they ever are, making sure you have plenty of ideas to mull. Two posts really stood out. First, do you think activist investors are nothing more than a disruptive pain in the rear? Not every activist is cut from the same cloth as Bill Ackman. Sometimes, these companies really do lend a stock a much-needed helping hand. Bryan Murphy found one such company today, called Ebix (EBIX). It used to be great, and now it's just mediocre. With some newcomers being named to the board, though, this once-great lion could roar again. Second, James Brumley continues his hunt for the next great trade, and named three stocks today that are close to doling out explosive upside moves... Ossen Innovation (OSN), Cyren (CYRN), and Globalstar (GSAT). You'll just have to take a look at his analysis and charts to see what the big deal is, and what should set each one off. Every one of the three, however, really does look like it has some serious potential. Or, if you want the best of the best stock picks and trading ideas more often, I'd encourage you to sign up for the free stock picks the Elite Opportunity team is now sending out. JetBlue (JBLU) was one of those picks from mid-October, and it's since gained 40% and is still going strong. While you can't get in a time machine and go trade JBLU now, you can make sure you don't miss the next big winner - just sign up for those free ideas, delivered as a text and/or as an e-mail alert. There's nothing to lose ("free" really means free), and everything to gain. Go here to sign up, or cut and paste this link: https://www.smallcapnetwork.com/pages/SCNEOL/v1/ Don't Read Too Much Into It Yeah, the market was up today, but don't read too much into it. It wasn't so much a plethora of bulls as it was a serious lack of bears. Just for some perspective, today's (Friday's) volume about the same amount of trading volume we saw on Wednesday, but Wednesday was only a half day for the market. What we're seeing here is the usual Santa Claus rally, which generally materializes not because buying is rampant but because there are so few bears who are bothering to put up a fight Just as a reminder, the average gain between Christmas and the end of the first two days of the following year is only about 2.0%, and that figure is whittled down to only 1.7% when taking out 1991's outsized 11.2% advance for those few days. Granted, we make some sort of gain more than 80% of the time after Christmas and before the beginning of the third trading day of the new year. But, it's rarely a big one. Mostly the market is just allowed to drift higher, as the sellers and bears remain disinterested until the dust settles on the beginning of the new calendar year. So how does today's gain fit into this idea? It's right as cued, prompting a little upside, using the technical room stocks have been given. In fact, there's just enough room for the S&P 500 to give us the decent Santa Claus rally we saw starting to take shape today. Take a look at the daily chart of the S&P 500 below. It was already in an uptrend, and had moved above a key ceiling at 2076 last week. With today's small advance, though, the bulls should be inspired enough to force the index to retest the upper 20-day Bollinger band at 2117.5. For reference, a move to that level from Wednesday's close of 2081.88 would be a 1.7% gain, right in line with the average Santa Claus rally. The NASDAQ confirmed the newly-found bullishness with a move above its resistance level at 4796.5. This constitutes a breakout, and assuming the composite's upper 20-day Bollinger band is still a big ceiling, this suggests the NASDAQ could advance 1.9% before hitting a wall. That's also in line with the normal Santa Claus rally effort. And no, I don't think any of this is a coincidence. Not only is the market plenty capable of allowing investors to create self-fulfilling prophecies, investors are even subconsciously capable of making sure the conditions are right to make calendar-based self-fulfilling prophecies. I'm talking specifically about the pullback from two weeks ago. Had we not gone through that, we wouldn't have room for a Santa Claus rally now. To answer the next question, no, I don't get the feeling getting the new year started on a bullish foot means January is going to be a huge winner... and this is despite the bullish clue we saw from the Russell 2000 today. Yes, in case you hadn't seen it, the Russell 2000 gained about 0.7% on Friday, pushing it beyond a resistance level at 1214 to record highs. On the surface this is bullish, but as I suggested to you a few days ago, the market may need to give traders a really good bullish head-fake to pull the rug out from underneath most of the trading crowd. The best way it could do so is to make it look like it was in breakout mode by tiptoeing to new-high levels, and then reversing to the downside the way it did in March and July. The bullish gap it left behind at the open today only makes this reversal all the more likely. I'm not trying to be Debbie-downer here. I still firmly believe the long-term market will be fine because the economy is on solid footing. I just don't see a lot of room for easy gains in early 2015 the way we saw then materialize early in 2014. I'm also not the only one with concerns about weakness in the coming year either. I like the way Allianz Global Investors' Kristina Hooper voiced it by saying we've borrowed something from 2015 and shouldn't be surprised to give it back in January. The counterargument to the expectation for a weak January is that not only is January usually a bullish month, but the strong the previous year is, the more likely it is we'll see a strong January as well. [I've checked the math on this one too, and sure enough, it stands up to the calculation test.] My only real issue with this premise is the same as The Reformed Broker's.... it only works when it works, and when it doesn't, it can get ugly. Take last year as an example. Calendar 2013 was a very bullish one for stocks, but January handed us a 3.1% selloff, and roughly a 5.4% plunge by the time the bleeding stopped in early February. My fear is traders are going to remember last year's mini-meltdown in January and assume a repeat of that weakness is inevitable, thus giving us another self-fulfilling prophecy. The strength we're presently seeing would be a perfect setup for such a profit-taking pullback, with a trailing P/E now above 18.0. Yeah, I'd say when we take a step back and cross-reference the calendar tendencies with the way the market's been shaping up since early December, (1) this all makes a lot of sense, and (2) none of it bodes very well for January. It's a good thing I don't really care about the so-called January effect, but we'll save that discussion for another day. For now we'll just expect the Santa Claus rally to play out as it's hinted so far, and then we'll plan on paying the piper once we get into the first full week of the new year. Let's cross this bridge when we get to it though. One day at a time.