Widespread Trouble Trumps Good Earnings

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Now we have to throw "successful retest" into the mix, just to make things even more difficult. Get ready for that chatter if we don't plummet huge in the afternoon. We have sentiment indicators back to some amazing levels, including the bull/bear with 22 bull. We are still minus 8 on the S&P oscillator. VIX back in the stratosphere.

We have people just completely blown away by yesterday's close. We are confused, because General Dynamics (GD - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Apple (AAPL - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Northrop Grumman (NOC - commentary - Cramer's Take) were good, and who expected anything great from Boeing (BA - commentary - Cramer's Take)?

AT&T (T - commentary - Cramer's Take) is being viewed as terrible, but I don't see the stock exceeding the horrible level it hit earlier this month, even as the nickel miss makes us feel crummy about that payout and the dividend. Won't people come back to IBM (IBM - commentary - Cramer's Take) after that great quarter and the 5-point subsequent decline?

Qualcomm (QCOM - commentary - Cramer's Take), an important bellwether, and Broadcom (BRCM - commentary - Cramer's Take), a once-important bellwether, are bucking trends, and VMWare (VMW - commentary - Cramer's Take), well, who would have thunk it?

The drug stocks have been uniformly pretty darned good. And we don't really want oil higher, we just want oil stocks higher, and that can happen, given some of the bountiful yields. The bank index is holding and might be forming a bottom, something that would be a definite when all the checks are cut from Treasury. How can people resist Morgan Stanley (MS - commentary - Cramer's Take)? McDonald's (MCD - commentary - Cramer's Take)? Thing of beauty.

In other words, I am not "buying" the bad-quarter thesis that is behind this decline. Once again, people will say we hold in pretty well despite a lot of gloom. I suspect that the "retest" folks will be in full glory if we don't finish down big.

Alas, the big "if." The last hour has been everything, and if we don't exceed where we hit today, the bulls will be out in abundance. If we do, then all of those good earnings will be trumped once again by the technicals, which will then say, "Forget it, we are going lower."

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