I've been stopped out of a few items this morning, all of them food-related (did people suddenly get really hungry over the weekend?) In most of these cases, I am going to re-enter the shorts with a more liberal stop.

My re-entry symbols and stops are:

BWLD 44.99
DRI 34.21
DF 22.32
GMCR 44.75

Last night, there was a widely-heralded interview with Ben Bernanke in which he assured everyone that (a) the recession would wrap up this year in all likelihood, which means the economic bottom is just months away; (b) the banks were going to be fine and dandy. The markets reaction was……

This comes almost exactly one year after, on March 8, 2008 (when the S&P was at 1275) Bernanke said: ""At the Federal Reserve, we will continue to forcefully deploy all the
tools at our disposal as long as necessary to support the restoration
of financial stability and the resumption of healthy economic growth."

I find it puzzling that, time and again, such governmental reassurances are embraced as gospel sources of comfort.

In any event, I still see the area just below 800 as a huge brick wall through which the S&P will have tremendous trouble getting past. I got stopped out of the /ES last night at 755 (and this time, I certainly didn't regret it……….) and re-entered a smaller position at 762. I will continue to tilt at this windmill until the /ES gives up the ghost, or until it's clear that 800 is going to be conquered after all.

Driving home tonight, I saw a huge billboard off the freeway from Charles Schwab which said:

"I did everything perfectly right.

Then everything went wrong."

That captures the essence of everything a financial services firm wants a customer to believe. That is, when the customer is making money, it is because they are so good; and the customer is losing money, it's because of uncontrollable outside forces.

You win? Endogenous excellence. You lose? Exogenous malevolence.

I have a simpler explanation. Most people have no idea what they are doing. None. They didn't know during the bull market, but it was very hard not to make money buying stocks. And they certainly don't know now, when hardly anyone is able to make anything.

I think a more honest billboard would be more along these lines:

"I got lucky. But my luck ran out."

One other comment about all the emotional chatter this weekend; one fellow wrote in to say he thought the reason people might be peeved is because I don't provide stop prices with all my trades.

For those of you who might expect stop prices, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. I rarely have time to provide them. Even if I do have the time, I probably won't bother. I might be in a trade 5 minutes or 5 days. Ideas that are offered should be given the same weight as you would glancing at a random ticker symbol scrawled in crayon on a piece of paper. A chart worth looking at out of curiousity. Nothing more. Don't expect a stop. Don't expect guidance. Expect little more than good conversation among, by and large, an intelligent and self-sufficient group of traders.

March 13 (Bloomberg) — The Standard & Poor's 500 Index may fall 25 percent in the next few months as earnings slump for a seventh quarter and the recession deepens, Morgan Stanley said.

The New York-based bank also reduced its year-end S&P 500 forecast by 15 percent to 825, joining four other Wall Street firms that cut their estimate in the past three weeks as stocks tumbled. The average year-end prediction for the S&P 500 is now 983, compared with 1,078 at the start of 2009, based on a Bloomberg News survey.

"The valuation must become outright cheap,'" wrote Jason Todd, Morgan Stanley's interim replacement for Abhijit Chakrabortti, who left the U.S. equity strategist job in January. "We are not there yet."

U.S. stocks are still expensive even after the S&P 500 dropped 52 percent in 17 months, according to a method used by Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing and mentor of Warren Buffett. He measured equities against a decade of profits to smooth out distortions, a method that shows the S&P 500 traded at 14.5 times earnings yesterday, according to data compiled by Yale University Professor Robert Shiller. At the bottom of the three worst recessions since 1929, the average ratio fell below 10. To reach that, the S&P 500 would have to sink more than 30 percent.

Should the S&P 500 follow Todd's forecast, the index would tumble to 560 and then surge 47 percent to finish 2009 at 825. Wall Street equity strategists lost credibility last year when none predicted a down year and the average forecast was for a gain of 11 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The stock index plunged 38 percent, the steepest decline since the Great Depression.

Strategists at Barclays Plc, UBS AG, Credit Suisse Group AG and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have reduced projections this year as the worsening financial crisis drove the S&P 500 to a 17 percent drop in 2009. On March 9, the index slid to the lowest level since September 1996.

"Throughout 2008 we were continually caught out by underestimating the size of markdowns and provisioning for the financial sector," Todd wrote in a report dated yesterday. "We were bearish but not nearly bearish enough."

Home prices need to stabilize, financial firms must report smaller losses and earnings at U.S. companies have to improve before Morgan Stanley becomes more bullish on equities, he said. American International Group Inc. reported a $61.7 billion loss, the biggest in U.S. history, last week and U.S. foreclosure filings climbed 30 percent in February from a year earlier, RealtyTrac Inc. said yesterday.

I've decided I am going to dispose of the guilt I have about letting too many comments accumulate. If I do a post on Friday afternoon, and by Monday morning there are 700 comments, so be it. I have a lot going on in my life, and believe me, I'm only going to get busier, so you should know that "xTrends-effect" (giant comment threads) will probably happen here too. Don't bother asking for comment cleaners. I'll do posts as time – – and the inspiration – – comes along.

After all, I pay good money for financial newsletters that come out three times a week. I've been doing something like three postings every few hours. My schedule – – – and the attitude I'm starting to see creep in from some readers – – convinces me to not worry so much about doing a dozen posts a day for my free blog. Maybe it'll be just one or two.

Having said that, one of my favorite charts is about the most low-tech imaginable……….it appears each day in the New York Times. I've scanned in today's:

I've added the circles on my own. This chart, simple as it is, has been really helpful to me during this bear market, because each time the indexes fight their way back up to one of those shaded zones, it's usually a sign that weakness is about to return.

In spite of having many long positions, I am more convinced than ever we're going to see weakness next week. I'm prepared for either direction, but a downward market would be more beneficial to me than continued strength.