Not quite as emotionally charged as what our friend from Nazareth would do but for the market it is kind of important.

Wyckoff believed that cause and result are necessarily intertwined. Lots of volume should push the market by lots of points. Conversely, low volume (effort) should result in little price movement. One look at the S&P with NYSE volume gives us neither. Prices have edged higher as volume edged lower.

Or, put another way, the tank is empty and the market is rising on vapors.

I know that the past two have given me the vapors. It is hard to fight the trend for so long but at the same time the S&P has gained about one point. That means I popped Tums like candy for no good reason, at least no good monetary reason.

Let’s switch gears. Warning – rant coming. If all you want are my technical musings you can skip to the final paragraph.

Why is it that something with even a sliver of a chance to be really bad is blown completely to a panic stage? The deaths – and I am certainly not making light of them – are still a very low in number. Someone out there can find some death stat for another medical issue – like cancer – and show that diseases we already have are far worse. But the pandemic of 1918? Let’s not get ahead of the facts.

Sure it is possible that this will end up to be really bad. But wasn’t AIDS also like this – with the ability to spread like wildfire? I am not disputing that AIDS was and is still horrific but rather that the panic now seems quite similar.

End of rant. Bringing it back to the market, this hair trigger fear of swine flu should be telling us about the sentiment of the public. It is willing to embrace depressions and pandemics rather quickly and that tells us there are plenty of problems left to be worked out in the stock market.