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Welcome to the weekend, one and all, and for the first time in a long time we can start the weekend not feeling like the market beat us up over the past five trading days. Funny thing is, this week was actually - technically - a loser; the S&P 500 closed down about 0.9%. All of the progress came on Friday on the heels of Thursday's modest rebound effort. None of that progress was enough to undo Monday's and Wednesday's damage, though.

So now what? We're going to stick with our original (from Wednesday) thesis and say the bounce is still underway. I'm basing this outlook not so much on the daily chart but on the weekly chart. It's in this timeframe we can see a huge long-tailed dragonfly doji from the S&P 500, and a tall gravestone doji from the VIX. Both point to more bullishness from stocks in the foreseeable future, since both are key reversal clues.

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Well, that was weird. We got the bounce we were due early on in Thursday's trading. We just didn't hang onto it. Nevertheless, the shape of today's bar suggests a short-term bottom is being made, so we're going to stick with our theory from yesterday and suggest planning on a near-term advance. It's too soon to say we're prepping for a long-term rebound though.

If it seems like we've been doing more candlestick analysis lately than we normally have in the past, you're not crazy - we have been doing more of it lately. There's a perfectly good reason why we're doing more of it now though... we're getting more relevant candlestick clues now than we have in the past. One of those clues came today.

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Happy Columbus Day, one and all. Although banks were closed in observation of the explorer's arrival in the Americas, the stock market (obviously) didn't shut down. And, maybe it's a good thing it didn't. We've been searching for a trade-worthy bottom lately and we may have found it today.

Just for the sake of simplicity, I just want to come right out and explain what I expect from stocks next, and then illustrate how I came to that conclusion. While I usually do things the other way around for you, this time, it'll all make a lot more sense if you know where I'm coming from.

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Happy Friday, fellow traders. Of course, if you were hoping/needing the market to bounce out of trouble today, it wasn't an especially happy Friday for you. It's too soon to give up all hope though. As they say, it's darkest before dawn.

Let's not beat around the bush. The S&P 500 broke below a key floor at 1926 today. On the other hand, today's beat-down suspiciously stopped at 1906, where the index hit bottom and rebounded in early August, and where the 200-day moving average line (green) is now. If there was a next-best place for the bulls to make a stand now that 1926 has broken, 1906 is it.

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Remember yesterday when we said we didn't trust Wednesday's rally as a sign of renewed bigger-picture bullishness? We hope you were listening to us. Today was a sucker-punch for stocks at a point when stocks didn't need any more problems. Perhaps even more troubling than that is how the market just squandered its best opportunity to recover relatively unscathed.

We'll take our usual detailed look at today's meltdown in a moment. The first thing we want to take care of today is responding to an accolade one of our readers sent in last night. Luca writes: