I guess I feel a little silly doing all these posts over the holidays, but my commitment to my loyal readers is strong. I particularly appreciate the guests doing posts, since that gives me a chance to actually vacate on my vacation. I notice some formerly-popular blogs have virtually shut down, doing a post only once every few days or so. People are gearing up to say adios to 2009, it seems.

And here we are, down to the final trading day of this year. I imagine it will be a low-volume affair, although there's bound to be some freakiness, particularly in the final hour. I mean, these days, we can't seem to close the day out without something totally bizarre happening in the final thirty minutes. Monday, a ramp-up; Tuesday, a ramp-down; today, another ramp-up.

Will there be any special reasons to buy or sell tomorrow? My hunch is that whatever end-of-year weirdness there is, it will be on the buy side. I mean…….tax-loss selling? What tax losses? Everyone who bought stocks is in the green. So what losses would they try to take?

How about window dressing? Yep, that would make sense. Stuff those portfolios with AAPL, GOOG, and other winners.

I personally think the tax-driven selling won't take place until March. Why? Because one year will have passed since the bottom on March 6th. If you bought a ton of, say, DTG in early March and have a multi-thousand percent gain, wouldn't you like to score a 15% tax rate instead of 39%? I personally know of people that have gigantic profits on these securities that are praying to God that things hold together until March so that they can get the hell out at an advantageous tax rate. I imagine such tax-based selling will continue for a few months, commencing promptly on March 6th.

It will be interesting to see what stocks like PIR (Pier One), shown below, are going to do in the coming months. I mean, how many scented candles and imported bongo drums does our nation need? Stocks like this, which have gone from ten cents to five bucks (for instance) have created a lot of very profitable positions. They're going to want to take their profits sometime!

As for me, I think I'm going to sign off for the day. The Santa Claus effect definitely seems to have pooped out last week, and my numerous positions are finally making minute progress in the right direction. I, for one, will be pleased to start with a fresh slate next Monday. I'll see you in the morning, before the opening bell!

Some people are famous because they're famous (think Ashton Kutcher). Some assets rise in value because they rise in value. Sometimes they're called momentum stocks; at others they're called fad stocks. Their nature is to rise – sometimes exponentially – until the public in general changes its mind.

I tripped across one of these last night while I was idly thumbing through the stocks in my Wrecks list – – none other than Jones Soda, which I had sort of forgotten about. Jones is a maker of specialty beverages (including some really tasty cream soda) that had a spectacular run of about 17,000% from late 2002 to April 2007. For some reason, people thought that cane sugar-based drinks (which are admittedly way better than the corn syrup junk most people drink) would be in every pantry in America.

What took me by surprise when I saw the chart last night was just how far this thing had fallen. It is down about 98%, has a market cap of only $12 million, and apparently is looking to simply be bought out at this point.

So the question to ponder at this point is………what are the "fad" stocks right now? What assets have zoomed up in price simply because they'd been bid up for months on end? Apple? Amazon? Or – dare I say it – gold? Not everything that goes way up in price is fated to plunge. But sometimes what creates an asset's value can largely be based on such animal spirits. It's worth considering.