OK, I'll make a comment cleaner (isn't Sunday supposed to be a day of rest, you lunatics?) but I'll make it more than just a sentence and will share a little personal story.

Longtime readers know that I have been starstruck by the Silicon Valley since I was fourteen years old. I bought my first property (a townhouse) partly because it was near Homestead High, where Jobs & Wozniak went to school. My sole investor in Prophet was Andy Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun (and Google's first investor). I can spot a "celebrity" at 100 yards, and one of my life's big moments was accosting Steve Jobs in Ace Hardware here in town, since I figured I'd never get a chance again to shake hands with him and tell him how much he meant to be (I'm glad I did).

So this afternoon, I took my beloved son to a Cub Scout event, and there on the breezy schoolyard field was none other than Chris Espinosa, employee #8 of Apple Computer. Yes, I can even recognize early employees of Apple. He and his son went to the basketball court and shot a few hoops in a way that no inner-city child would ever find threatening.

And I thought to myself………this is just too cool.

Sad, ain't it? But I love this town.

I continue to agonize over what's next. It occurred to me I could simply step aside altogether, but you'd soon find I'm a lot less interesting commentator on the markets if I'm not actually in them. In any case, I went back to the early 1930s to see how it behaved, and I saw many instances during that plunge where I'm sure it would have been easy to make a case for a big move upward:

The problem, though, is that if you look at the recent market (especially with a line graph), there is nothing – and I mean nothing -to equal the speed of the plunge we've seen. Not 2000-2002. Not 1987. Not 1973-1974. Not even the Great Depression. Nothing. I can simply find no other instance of anything like it.

So I keep leaning toward the idea that things are so ungodly stretched to the downside and a robust bear market rally is in the cards. It's still a real dilemma, since, taken individually, my short positions are very attractive. But very few shorts could do well in the face of a 200 point S&P rally, which I think may be in the cards.