And so ends my week at Stanford Sierra Camp – a week in which your host:

• Stared down a wild black bear at fifteen feet (seriously!)
• Water skied for the first time in his life (cruising along Fallen Leaf Lake for over 30 seconds…..)
• Shot an egg – yes, an egg – with a bow & arrow at a distance of 40 feet.

It's been a great trading week, and even though I worked for most of this "vacation", I've enjoyed it tremendously.

I'm not sure if I'll do a post before Monday, since I've buried you guys with ideas all week long, but perhaps I will. In any event, enjoy the weekend, and thanks for a great week of terrific commentary!

Here are a few charts I pulled in the wee hours of the morning for you to ponder.

And the one I suggested on July 8th – – when it was $45! – –

I have, since 6:30 a.m., been cutting back on positions and taking profits.

I get a lot of emails from readers with all kinds of opinions. Many of them are very well constructed, and many of them contradict one another. Added to this, I read a handful of sites that I respect. There really is no consensus at all right now.

Generally speaking, what I tend to agree with these days is that we're going to head into a "C" wave upward to as high as 1325 or so on the S&P. At that point, all hell is going to break loose to the downside. (Many have tried to talk me out of Elliott Wave, but I'm still a believer). So I'm positioning myself for that, which means I'm taking profits wherever I think there's a risk for a bounce, and I'm tightening up my stops everywhere else.

So I'm sitting on an increasingly large amount of cash, and there's definitely a part of me that would like to see the S&P get strong and make its way higher.

It's nearly midnight as I am typing this. A few minutes ago, I encountered a wild bear.

Nope, I'm not making this up. Let me explain. As regular readers know, I am at Fallen Leaf Lake near Tahoe. Tonight I decided to do some star-gazing, since everything is so clear here – – you can easily see the Milky Way, and Jupiter is almost painfully bright. So I went out on the boat dock, did the star thing, and started heading back to the lodge.

A couple of guys were staring at something, and since I'm the curious sort, I hunched down to see what they were looking at. It was a brown bear, probably about five feet long, staring back at us, maybe fifteen feet away. Even though I heard a story yesterday about a woman whose arms were both taken off by a bear (in Alaska, not around here), I didn't feel nervous. We made some noise, and he galoomphed away. He was really very beautiful, and I was glad to have seen him. Although the thought did occur to me how ironic it would be if I was maimed or killed by a bear, of all things. I think he could sense I was a kindred spirit, so he left us unharmed. Had I been Abby Joseph Cohen, he surely would have attacked, in spite of the smell.

I had compiled a ton of charts tonight, but my connection is rather slow, so I'm actually going to make this quick. I had a very, very good day today. I'm not sure if it was my best percentage gain ever, but it was awfully close. I was blown away how well things went. Even though energy has slowed its descent, my energy puts did terrific, and I'm still wondering if OIH is going to break beneath its fan line to start the next act of this play.

I am extremely short banks, and I find the huge rally provided by the bulls a few days ago to be a tremendous blessing. It made things cheap for bears.

In all the tumult, there are a couple of ways to play it – – either play the bullish side by taking advantage of battered prices, or play the bearish side by taking advantage of pullbacks. CAL is an example of the latter, since I shorted it after it rebounded hundreds of percent in just days.

Whereas CROX was the opposite. I bought a bunch of this when it was at about $7.50, and I sold it all at about $9 a couple of days later. Thank goodness I made this an opportunistic trade, because the opening bid should be around $5 or so tomorrow. That was one close call.

I have puts on RKH, which, in addition to my puts on stuff like LEH, WFC, and BAC, is a great way to play the "cascade" we're witnessing.

I'll belabor my $UTIL short again, but at least this time I'll post a target, which I've tinted below. If we break the neckline, my target is about 370-380.

I am still long DUG, and this has been a fantastic trade. I started accumulating this when it was in the high 20s, and let's face it, this is a very bullish looking formation, particularly with the volume surge.

I'm going to leave the mountain of charts I had pulled for you unused. I'm going to bed now, hopefully avoiding any nasty dreams about bear attacks. Since he just headed off in a different direction, I'll remember him as cute instead of fearsome. Kinda like another bear you know! G'nite………

Another nice opportunity.