You've probably heard the old saw about war: long stretches of unbearable boredom interrupted by brief spurts of sheer terror. That's what the market seems like these days. In spite of whatever you may read about a tame VIX, the market is knee-deep in whipsaw dust.

The tinted areas you see above are, in this young month, the instances where the S&P went flying either higher or lower in a very short amount of time. I still am slack-jawed with shock that a massive government bailout, which two months ago would have yielded a +400 day for the Dow, whithered away into nothing. FRE was down. FNM was down. So was the Dow. And the S&P. And the Russell.

Incredible.

Tomorrow is going to be gargantuan. Both PPI and Retail Sales get reported at 8:30 EST. And then Ben Bernanke is hauled in front of Congress at 10:00 EST to have a little chat about monetary policy. Do you think they'll be able to find anything to talk about?

And after the close, earnings season heats up with INTC and CSX. And in the coming weeks, day by day, the quantity of companies reporting earnings will push higher.

I'm a frustrated bear, because in spite of the continued weak market, my portfolio is at a standstill. It's going to tack a whack at energy to really push my portfolio value higher. But that's where I see the best trades right now. This is going to be a deliberately short post today (but, hey, you got two earlier), so with that, I will bid you farewell.

Judging from the pre-market action this morning, one would expect the Dow to be up several hundred points right now. Amazingly, all the major indexes are in the red. It seems that, unlike before, the US Government rushing in to the rescue isn't having the effect it did in months past. Well, it did have an effect – for a few  minutes – but not the kind of giant bounce one might normally expect.

So we should open ourselves up to the idea of a continued swoon. In spite of today's choppy action, I still think the likelihood of a big bounce is very real, but as an alternate, keep in mind the large down-sloping trendlines I have drawn below. There is the prospect of the Dow and the S&P continuing to push there way to these levels (Dow about 10,700, and S&P about 1,170).

Update: Soon after I made this post, a reader sent it his own chart, which seems to line up with my own S&P projection.

Just as people describe mid-March as the "BSC Bottom", I think what we saw Friday will be remembered as the "FRE/FNM Bottom." Thanks – once again – to a government-orchestrated bailout, the market is getting ready for a major bounce.

I'm glad to see this for a couple of reasons. First, it makes sense from a charting perspective (as I wrote this weekend). And I like it when things make sense. It appeals to my rationality. And I'm serious about this. It would actually be frustrating and confusing for me if the market had kept dropping on Monday. We were so due for a bounce.

Second, we bears need a lift in this market. A lot of sectors are way too beaten down to be attractive shorting opportunities. The same certainly applies to stock indexes in general. I'm watching the @ES0809 right now (it's 4:15 in the morning), and it just keeps leaping higher (currently up about 19.75). I would like to see it up about twice that much (getting back to about 1,270 on the S&P 500) before I even toyed with the idea of an index put. And this is a major intermediate bottom, the bulls might enjoy another 100 points or so tacked on top of that before we start to tilt down again.

What is very clear now is that mid-May was a gift. Although I was griping, agonizing, and whining about it at the time, we simply didn't know how good we had it. If you look at a daily chart of the S&P, the huge rise from mid-March mid-May was a gift straight from heaven. In retrospect, it obviously would have made sense to run around like mad and short every non-energy stock in existence, because it was a perfect setup for the bears. It just goes to show you what a blessing in disguise looks like.