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Hope your week is treating you well. The markets are absolutely nuts, but we'll make some sense of it today for you. Before we get into it though, speaking of nuts... did you happen to see how YELP traded in the last hour yesterday before earnings? Stock traded sideways for most of the day and then in the last hour of trading tanked on over $300K shares of volume when the stock only traded 898K shares on the day. Roughly 30% of yesterday's volume was traded in the last hour to the down side. Weak hands dumping into earnings? Maybe a little but I seriously doubt the bulk of that volume could be attributed to that. Classic market maker manipulation if you ask me.

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Markets continue to grind pretty much sideways in anticipation of some sort of guidance as to what the ECB plans to do in Europe over the next few days, as well as any hints from the Fed regarding further easing. I suspect much of this has been over played by the media though, so it's quite possible the markets aren't going to be affected much at all unless something extremely unexpected takes place.

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The major indexes continue to be propped up as they await for some Fed fixin's. Currently, the NASDAQ Composite is again hovering around that 2978 level we've talked about so often over the last few months. It's a very key level since it represents a complete 5/8 retracement from the April highs to the June low. What that means is the recent bounce off the June low was a very logical and natural reaction following the selloff, which started in late April. And, so has been where the Composite has stalled twice now since earlier this month. Here's why...

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Good Monday to you. Hope you had a nice recharging weekend. What an awesome display of commitment and hard work put on by many of the world's best athletes this weekend, eh? Couldn't get enough of the Olympic games. Seeing these young athletes finally have their day truly is amazing. Can you imagine the countless hours of dedication with no guarantee of any real reward for four years? Very inspiring to say the least.

The markets sure are jubilating over the possibility of the Fed and the ECB (European Central Bank) working together to inject additional monetary stimulus into two of the largest world economies. Once word started to spread late last week that the Fed and the ECB were expected to act this week, the major indexes turned on a dime and erased the week's losses in no time. However, take all of the rumor, hype and media out of the equation and all you get is the continuing pattern we've seen now weeks. With slight exception to the NASDAQ Composite and NDX charts, the DOW Industrials and the S&P charts show the continued pattern of higher highs and higher lows.

We've referenced this enough now to the point where it has become pretty obvious for anyone paying attention. Ever since the market put in a short-term low back in early June, these two indexes have continued this pattern. I've included a daily chart of the S&P here, which looks pretty identical to the DOW. See the trend lines I've included here? It's been almost scary orderly. The markets are typically never that obvious, which is what has us a bit concerned. Could the markets just continue like this, breakout and start a new leg up? Absolutely. The markets are always right regardless of what we or anyone else thinks.

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Well, looks like our edition on Apple yesterday for the most part was right on point. We didn't like the stock before earnings and now investors don't like it after. You can find the details about the tech giant's earnings report just about everywhere you look, so we're not going to waste a bunch of time digging into their numbers.

The bottom line is the darling of the U.S. Stock Market missed for the first time in years. The stock tumbled roughly 30 points in afterhours and is down over 20 as I type, however, while most investors have been led to believe AAPL's numbers are a sign of the times, I think the reality of their misstep is likely due in large part to a new CEO and the simple fact that not everyone in the world is going to buy a new Iphone or iPad every quarter. That's the layman explanation anyway. As a matter of fact, I'd be willing to speculate even in a good economy, Apple had this coming.