A funny thing has happened in the last 6-8 weeks.There appears to be very little sellers present.  Literally.  The market has made a massive push and it really struggles to sell or stay down.  It seems almost funny how bad it is to try to short for more than maybe 20 minutes at a time.As most traders find out - fighting the market is pointless, all you can do is react to what you are given.  But it sure makes trading hard - the buy and hold guys have it locked down.

One thing I know is that you cannot continue this indefinately - the chasing and then bidding the market so it wont sell will stop.  The only way you actualy make money, whether day trading or longer term investing, is to  lock in profits.Until then, its not reality.At some point they will turn the tide from chasing in, to wanting out to lock in profits (or avoid losses).

A key pattern lately has been to break below support and then out of nowhere a massive burst of buying jams the market back to the highs.This sort of thing happens so often now, its completely expected.Most of the time this results in a new low being made, followed shortly by new daily highs as the buyers chase like crazy.

Even in the height of the bull market, we would repeatedly have 10-15+% corrections in the market that would last a month or so.And this was what happened when everything was good.  So I am not sure what is going on now.  Several theories are in play that I think about:

1. Shorts are completely or mostly out of the market.  The SEC messing with the short rules before caused a panic, and now there are many proposals again in regard to uptick rule and shorting.  Rather than get caught, they are staying away from day trading and longer term positioning.
2. The level of manipulation appears high.  There is a group of large banks or funds that are pushing the market higher at the Fed's and Treasuries request to try to turn the economy out of the recession by making it appear as if the stock market has it figured out.  The way the rescues happen like clockwork, the ramps into the close every friday, and other very odd trading behavior gives this some credence imo.  Would be easy for the government to just give these guys money to push the market up.
3. Traders are mostly gone, and computer algorithm trading takes over.This can happen also - computerized trading has taken over more of the futures market, which in turn drives stocks.Since no one tries to fight this trend, with all of them doing the same thing it just feeds on itself.I like this theory too because the actual price variance is so unusually low on these large pushes higher.  I have seen the dow futures push up 100 pts in 20 minutes with maybe an 8-9 point max retrace the whole time.  Sure this happens - but not this often as it does now.

Whether any of these are true, or a combination, I have no idea and we may never.  All I know is the trading action is very odd and I expect at least half if not more of this gain to be gone when this is done.  Note - I am not predicting a top, I am saying that when this is done, these idiots will undo this much faster than it actually ran up as everyone heads for the exits.  We could hit 9k, 10k etc.I relaly do not see 10,000 as possible right now, because GM, C and a few others are dead - they just don't have the fuel short term.

Maybe everyone just needs to learn to trade again – this is the new market to stay!