The Need to Be Long Is Lifting Us All

Did Abbott (ABT - commentary - Trade Now) scare the shorts? Or was it so easy to get people to buy winners and sell losers at the end of the quarter that the market had to go higher? What makes a thin market levitate rather than decline?

I got to thinking about this and the incredibly bullish comments by one of my favorite strategists, Byron Wien -- comments that are even more bullish than usual for him -- and concluded that the single best thing that the bulls have going for them is that the market is up big and you look like a real knucklehead if you aren't invested or haven't made any money on the long side going into the fourth quarter.

In fact, it is so bad that when I speak to my friends who are in hedge funds, they are uniformly culling those without exposure or those who didn't have exposure when it was lower and blasting them for staying too negative in what is now looking like one of the greatest rallies ever.

That self-fulfilling prophecy coupled with takeovers that people like, such as the Abbott deal, not to mention Affiliated (ACS - commentary - Trade Now) - Xerox (XRX - commentary - Trade Now), and a sense that things are better in technology -- Apple (AAPL - commentary - Trade Now), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ - commentary - Trade Now), Cisco (CSCO - commentary - Trade Now), Juniper (JNPR - commentary - Trade Now), Western Digital (WDC - commentary - Trade Now) being the kinds of things that are working -- have made it so that days like yesterday produce buying, not selling.

In fact, I sense more antipathy toward underperforming managers than I ever have in my life. People do not want to give a break to anyone who sat out this rally, which means there is going to have to be a lot of performance made between now and year-end. That performance will be hard to come by on the short side without definitive letdowns in earnings and employment.

I am not going to ignore important data. But I am pretty sure that excluding tech, the data is simply mixed, not bad -- including retail, housing and autos. (The bears would have you believe that there is shadow inventory lurking everywhere in the system, but that's not what happens when you order less, fire more, build less and work off old inventory, which is what is happening pretty much everywhere.)

So, we can carp. We can say "oil futures down, sell." We can bemoan how bad things are. But managers are going to lose their jobs this year for not being bullish enough unless they turn.

I think they are going to turn now. And that's what yesterday was about.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long Abbott, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard.

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