Complacency or Confidence?

What's with all the upgrades as this market is trying to stabilize?

One of the first things I do each day is read through two different brokerage notes that summarize the tech and market news of the past 24 hours. I read them for a sense of how the Street is analyzing things, more so than for the analysis itself.

This morning's notes contain several upgrades of disparate stocks in disparate tech subsectors. For example, Juniper (JNPR - commentary - Cramer's Take) was bumped to overweight from equal-weight at Morgan Stanley, and SanDisk (SNDK - commentary - Cramer's Take) was upgraded at CIBC. There were also lots of reiterations of buys, such as Merriman still thinking Nortel (NT - commentary - Cramer's Take) has a sustainable turnaround going on. And target bumps today are also aplenty, such as Deutsche Bank raising MEMC Electronic Materials' (WFR - commentary - Cramer's Take) price target to $65 from $55.

It's certainly possible that these analysts are about to be dead right with their optimism. The fundamentals at all of those companies are strong enough that they could surprise to the upside if the economy catches fire again. But as a trader looking to scale into more longs, I'd sure rather see these analysts panicking and downgrading in a fit of fear.

Complacency or confidence? Ah, the age-old question remains. I'm still in patient scaling mode, as I continue to follow my well-laid-out playbook.

At the time of publication, the firm in which Willard is a partner had no positions in the stocks mentioned, although positions can change at any time and without notice.

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Cody Willard is the manager of CL Willard Capital Management, LLC. He is a regular guest on Fox News, CNBC and other networks, and he writes a monthly column for the Financial Times. He is also an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and the author of TheCodyReport.net, a monthly stock market newsletter. Willard appreciates your feedback -- click here to send him an email.