For all the countless hours I spend working on this blog for free, I'm asking you to take a few minutes to answer a poll. OK, the guilt trip is over now! Honestly, if you'd be kind enough to answer a few questions, I'd genuinely appreciate it. (And, sorry, since the market was so dull today, this is going to suffice for my afternoon entry).

Let me first explain why I'm even doing this poll in the first place. Some of you know that I founded Prophet.net many, many years ago, and I sold it over three years ago. Frankly, not much of anything has happened with the site (with the exception of ProphetCharts' introduction), and I am hoping for the opportunity to completely redo and "relaunch" the site later this year.

The present idea I have is to relaunch Prophet as trading platform for chartists. So you'd be able to trade directly from Prophet, have all your trading information reflected within the site, and (naturally) enjoy blogs (starting with Slope, and expanding into others) within the platform. I personally find there is a huge, huge amount of "secretarial work" I have to do when trading (cutting and pasting symbols from place to place, moving items from list to list based on whether I have a position in them, updating cash balances, entering new positions into MarketMatrix, and so on).

So I've got a few questions to ask to help me see if I'm on the right track or if I should take a different tack. (Note: the term drawn object, used below, means something you'd drawn in ProphetCharts, such as a trendline, a Fibonacci retracement, a horizontal line, etc). Please choose an answer for each question, and click "Vote" for each one.

Lastly, if you are a current (or former) Prophet.net user and have any other specific suggestions for really fundamental ways to improve the site, I'd love to hear from you (or just leave a comment in the comments section of this post). Thanks, everybody!

Wow. We should have recognized this one all along. Abby Joseph Cohen was given the heave-ho from her very prominent, very public role into some similarly-named but not nearly as visible job at GS on March 17th. In other words, the loudest permabull on the planet was zapped by GS on the exact day of the market's low. How's that for a contrary indicator?

Unfortunately, that's not something we can make use of again, except insofar as public spectacles like that actually mean something.

I'll also mention that my little foray into being bullish on housing/financing stocks made me a few hundred bucks here and there, but I've sold all of these off now. There are breakout failures all over the place. I got lucky, but I don't think a long-term hold thing would bring anything but misery.

Hopefully a little later today I'm going to ask you to return all the love I provide in this blog by answering some survey questions. Stay tuned. 

I wanted to share with you some quotes from some notable, respected sources about the end of the bear market..…

Analyst says bear market is beginning to level out.
Richard Cripps, chief market strategist for Legg Mason Wood Walker Inc., is urging investors to begin leaning toward small- and mid-cap companies with lower valuations and higher projected earnings growth than the Standard & Poor 500, because the economy is transitioning out of a bear market. Cripps predicts the equities market is moving in a much different direction than the immediate past markets

Time to say bye-bye to the bear?
In case you missed it — or were too dazed to notice — the stock market has bottomed. "The bear is dead!" screamed a recent stock market report from Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist for A.G. Edwards Inc. in St. Louis. Maybe it's a rash pronouncement, but other economists and market strategists are preparing eulogies as well.

Stock Investors Start to Believe That the Worst May Be Over
"We are all trained to look at this rationally and objectively, but I've got to say that there also was a gut feel that this couldn't go down too much farther," says Jon Brorson, director of stocks at the money-management arm of Northern Trust Corp. in Chicago. "We all sat together in meetings and said this has got to turn, this has got to turn. It was basically one of those chewed-on-pencils kinds of things." The firm has urged its clients to shift some money out of cash reserves and into stocks. Technology stocks took some of the worst punishment over the past 15 months, but even some longtime skeptics about tech stocks don't expect the broad market to fall much more. Although "the incredibly strong stock market that we have experienced for the last few years is unlikely to repeat itself for a while," says Henry Herrmann, chief investment officer at mutual-fund group Waddell & Reed in Overland Park, Kan., "I think the trend is up. So I guess I'd have to say that we are in a bull market." Robert Morris of Lord Abbett & Co. in Jersey City, N.J., another tech skeptic, says "I don't see how you could be bearish here" about the broad market.

And these sentiments are understandable, considering the market's strength…………..which is undeniable:

Oh, wait, did I mention one other thing? I think I should. These quotes were all from the spring of 2001. Allow me to share with you a bit of a larger context, with the above graph tinted in yellow.

So, in all honesty, I think that all of you that are in bull-mode right now probably have the same disposition – – and reasons – – that the esteemed individuals mentioned above had at this exact time of season seven years ago. And I think you'll be proved every bit as wrong. As for my bearish friends. May God smile upon us and, for once, reward skepticism and prudence.

I never thought much of the term "MicroHoo" that was coined back on February 1st. It seemed like something a bit NSFW (and even fairly alluring). But not business-like.

In any case, it's a term that needn't be used, because YHOO has thumbed its nose at a deal that they will probably be begging to have back in a few months. Formerly large tech companies that get past their prime (Netscape, AOL, Sun) don't typically turn around and get big again. They get irrelevant.

It'll be interesting to see what each stock does Monday morning. I would guess YHOO would get hammered and MSFT might actually go up since they're not engaging in this not-so-bright transaction.

I spent part of the weekend at the Maker Faire, which, culturally, is probably the closest I'll ever get to Burning Man. I've never felt so normal in my life. For a stick-in-the-mud like me, it was a freak show, with:

• The largest concentrated collection of man boobs on the planet
• Fishnet stockings on many pairs of legs, most of which would permanently destroy any sexual appeal in a man's mind for fishnet stockings
• Garb that looked straight out of Dickensian England
• Long-haired hippie freaks
• Long-haired women (err, that would be on the armpits)

I did get to revisit my childhood fondness for model rocketry, but I left the place feeling like Mr. Middle America. It wasn't all bizarre, though. At least there were about ten men driving self-propelled cupcakes. So that balanced things out a bit.

I'm thinking I was hasty in dumpy my FSLR puts.

Looking at the past history of this stock, the last time it had an ascending triangle breakout, everything about the breakout was healthy – – the volume, the retracement – – the whole schmear.

But this time, the breakout is a mess, which suggests to me this breakout is going to become a breakdown instead.