Good morning, everyone, and greetings from pitch-black Palo Alto. Another two-thirds of a million Americans were reported as having lost their jobs, and in a desperate move for good news, MarketWatch headlines this as being "not as bad as feared," much like the poor student whose mother breathes a sigh of relief when he brings home a C- on his report card.

The /ES briefly popped higher on the news (what with it being not as bad as feared and all) and then lost those gains, only to sink lower. So I guess the risk of some amazing jobs reporting sending the market 700 points higher today is behind us. Instead, I offer this rather tall chart.

I used to be as obsessed with the Russell as I am with the /ES now, but my interest in the Russell has rekindled recently. Anyway, the point to make on this chart is much the same as I am making on other major index charts – – there's a lot of muck above current price levels bulls are going to have to conquer. This overhead supply is, presently, the bear's best friend.

One interesting thing I noted is this: the measured target from the head and shoulders pattern (the rounded rectangle, encompassing a pattern so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes) was about 450 which, err, it achieved nicely. It fell well past that, and now it has recovered to the same level. So the target for this pattern has morphed itself into a resistance level now.

I don't relish us beating around these levels for months on end. I'd rather jump in the time machine and find us much higher so I can buy puts like a Banshee (wait a second, they were the screamers, weren't they? Perhaps they bought puts too.) But we work with what we have. Good luck out there.

As I stare at the S&P chart (an act I do far too often for any otherwise mentally healthy person), I am finding it hard to conjure up a circumstance where we get to my oft-cited 1050 figure. My wild-assed guess about that the S&P is going to do over the next year is along these lines (literally):

At this point, I do not think we have a market which is (a) So Expensive Everything Is a Short (e.g. October 11, 2007), nor do we have a market which is (b) So Battered Everything Is a Buy (e.g. March 6, 2009). I think it's more of a stock-picker's market, and I've got a couple of examples of that.

The first one is our old buddy Celgene, which tumbled hard yesterday. This is an example of a stock which doesn't care if the market is soaring. The pattern is so powerful, it eventually succumbs. This is a real "keeper", as I am holding on to my shorts as well as my puts on CELG.

By contrast, we have this evening's after-hours success story, RIMM. This member of the "four horsemen" (now that is a term I bet you haven't heard in a while!) lost nearly 80% of its value (red arrow), but it did a nice double-bottom on a retracement (tinted area). I bought RIMM at $40, and it is trading at nearly $60, the area I've circled.

Isn't that nice and clean? There's nothing I enjoy more than a trading range bounded by Fibonacci levels. Could RIMM move higher still? Of course it could. And if it blasts off tomorrow morning and never looks back, I guess I'll hang on to it. But if it noodles around the upper 50s and lower 60s and just churns away, I'm heading for the exit.