It's a rarity for me get on my soapbox and really rant about something someone else said, so you may want to mark October 24th, 2014 on your calendar - it's about to happen. I don't know how many of you peruse Yahoo! Finance in your daily efforts to remain fully informed of the stock market's ongoing saga, but I look at it daily. While I don't think Yahoo! Finance is the best resource out there for traders or investors, I do think the Yahoo! Finance home page is the best aggregator of information out there. One 5-second look at the main page, and you've got all the big stories and a market snapshot. In any case, I got sucked into one of the Yahoo! Finance headlines today I'm willing to be at least a few of you guys saw... Jeff Macke's "Amazon Down 10%: The real reason why and how to trade it." Against my better judgment, I clicked on it. I'm simultaneously glad and miserable I clicked. I can summarize the gist of Macke's response to Amazon's sizable loss in Q3 as "earnings don't matter when you're growing the way Amazon is growing." Specifically, Macke explained: "Investors don't care about EPS because Amazon is an $80 billion discounter growing about 20% per year..." All well and good, but I take issue with Macke is in his philosophy and assumptions about how irrelevant earnings are. Folks, one bad quarter isn't going to kill Amazon. Sometimes you have to take a short-term hit to score a long-term victory. Amazon doesn't log just one bad quarter every now and again, though. The company's earnings have been deteriorating - significantly - since 2011 when spending went into high-gear again. Some of that CapEx was on new warehouses to facilitate faster deliveries. Some of that spending was on the introduction of cloud services. Some of that was on the development of the Kindle Fire, and then some more of that was on the Fire phone. Yet, that whole time, the finishing touches were never even able to get put on one project before the spending went into high gear on the next one. Revenue just can't catch up with expenditures. And after seeing three years of it, a reality starts to materialize.... Amazon isn't choosing to spend a little now to grow a lot later. It's spending a lot now just to keep up with the crowd, and it's not even doing that very well. Folks, it's not difficult grow your business rapidly if your prices are rock-bottom and your margins are paper thin. That business model, however, isn't one that can remain in place very long. To give credit where it's due, Amazon's heavy spending in the late 90's and early 2000's did bear profits between 2004 and 2012. The current CapEx cycle is just getting started though, and this time, the proverbial end-zone may be permanently out of reach. The Kindle has been outmatched by the iPad. The Fire phone has been outmatched by the iPhone and the Galaxy. The company's cloud services are soon going to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft and a bunch of others. Amazon's video-on-demand service is still outmatched by Netflix. The point is, the goal may be out of reach this time, and Amazon may well be in a position where it couldn't spend enough to keep up even if it wanted to. What's this got to do with Jeff Macke and his suggestion that earnings don't matter? Folks, earnings may not matter all the time, but there comes a time when earnings matters enormously. And in my experience, once the market decides they matter, the market tends to make a HUGE deal of how much they matter. I don't know when that time will come for Amazon, but I suspect soon now that we've seen several quarters of deteriorating results. I just hope for shareholders' sakes that Amazon.com is working towards greater profitability rather than away from it at the time earnings start to matter. My fear is, however, the company is caught in a trap where the only way it knows how to grow is to spend more and more. Alright, I'm getting off my high-horse. But, before I completely shut up about Amazon and how we should all be viewing things today, let me give a shout out to the guys over at the Elite Opportunity who saw this coming. Yep, back in September 12th, John Monroe and his team deemed AMZN was worthy of a short trade... a bearish bet against a stock. As of today, the stock's down about 12% from their pick-point. Nice call. What's that? You aren't a subscriber to the Elite Opportunity newsletter? Well, I've got some bad news for you then - the big profit on the Amazon short isn't even close to the only big winner you've missed by not being an EO member. The good news is, it's a problem that can be solved today, with relative ease. Just sign up for a membership. If you want to try before you buy you can do that too. Sign up for a risk-free, no-obligation two-week trail to the Elite Opportunity service. It may well be the best thing you ever did for your portfolio. Here's how to get a free two-week trial . Or, cut and paste this link: https://www.smallcapnetwork.com/?vmpd_ckstr[click_track]=Newsletter&vmpd_ckstr_redirect=/pages/SCNEO/v1 OK, 'nuff said. Time to move on to something else. Real Estate Report Card Updated Back on Tuesday we added existing home sales to this month's ever-updating snapshot of the current real estate situation. The pace of existing home sales picked up from 5.05 million to 5.17 million, underscoring modest advances we saw on the housing starts and building permits fronts a week earlier. In the meantime this week we heard updated numbers for the FHFA Housing Price Index as well as the new figure for new-home sales. The former was up 0.5% for August, and the latter held steady at August's pace of 466,000, rolling in at 467,000 units for September. Take a look. The only thing we have left to hear on the real estate and construction front is the Case Shiller Index, which will be updated on Tuesday of the coming week. That's going to be for August's data though, so I'm not even sure how much I'd worry about it. Whatever the case, it's pretty clear we're still moving ahead at a healthy pace in terms of real estate and construction. It's not a red-hot pace, but it's upward bound. That'll do. Market Talk We've gone a little long today, thanks to my rant, so we'll keep things short and sweet with out look at the overall market. Basically, the bulls may have won the day, but I'm still not crazy about how this has all gone down... well, up, technically. The S&P 500 is now up 7.9% since last Wednesday's low, which is too much. Not surprisingly, though, the S&P 500 seems to be capped at 1967, where the 50-day moving average line (purple) is, and where the S&P 500 has found a major floor as well as a major ceiling in the past few weeks. While it looks like the index is ready to poke through the ceiling at 1967, this would be the right time and place to stage a pullback. Honestly, I'm surprised we didn't see it start sometime today or yesterday. Still, I see 1967 as the big line in the sand here. Anything above that could lead to a pretty good breakout, although given how overbought stocks already are, it would likely be a short-lived breakout. The best thing that could happen for the long-term market right now is still a small pullback and then a renewal of the rally at a sustainable pace. The cool part is, there are a ton of potential support lines not too far under where we are now. A dip to 1926 could be enough to do a lot of needed cleanup work to let the rally get going again. If the S&P 500 should manage to break above 1967, the top is likely to be made when the VIX reaches its lower Bollinger band, currently at 11.5. We'll look at that when the time comes though.