Eyeing Exhaustion in Midsummer Madness?

Index	Close	Change
Dow	9094.59	-34.38
S&P 500	994.09	-6.33
Nasdaq Composite	1747.97	-5.24
Nasdaq 100	1291.99	-2.48
Russell 2000	473.67	-3.26
Semiconductor Index (SOX)	399.58	-2.29
Bank Index	895.27	-11.31
Amex Gold Bugs Index	141.66	-1.95
Dow Transports	2597.51	+23.54
Dow Utilities	234.70	-3.93
NYSE advance-decline	-1,226	-120
Nikkei 225	9735.97	-15.03
10-year Treasury Bond	3.95%	+0.031

Editor's note: This column, which reflects market activity from the day before, originally appeared July 16 on RealMoney.com. To sign up for RealMoney, where you can read Bill Fleckenstein's commentary every day, please click here for a free trial.

Last night's news was Intel's(INTC Quote) quarter (much more about that below), Sears'(S Quote) sale of its credit card business, and earnings disappointments from Motorola(MOT Quote), Lucent(LU Quote) and ASML Holding(ASML Quote). The overnight response was mass excitement on the back of Intel, with the futures initially almost 1% higher. That kind of wore off, perhaps due to the weakness in bonds in the wee hours. Interestingly enough, the dollar was quite strong, though by the time we got around to opening this morning, it reversed.

Bulls on Sabbatical: After opening on the highs of the day, the market basically headed straight down, such that within a couple hours, the indices were off about 1%. We spent the entire day flopping and chopping not too far from the lows, then surged once more late in the afternoon to set the prices you see in the box scores. The bifurcated action saw tech and housing stocks mixed, and most financials red. Other than that volume again came in higher, today was kind of a nonevent.

Away from stocks, I think the action previously described was kind of important. It's not impossible that yesterday was one final puke in the euro and the metals, and the low is now in. We will know soon enough. Turning to today's action, silver was flat and gold was up $1. The euro and the Canadian dollar were up about 0.5%. The yen, however, was weaker. Fixed income (30-year futures), after being all over the place, finally closed flat. These markets have all seen an enormous amount of motion and remain a bit unsettled, but if they all start behaving "in concert" over the next couple of days, we might be able to piece together what's really going on. Stay tuned.

On the Stock Docket . . . : I thought I would now reprise where we are in the rally that's been going on since the spring, and talk a little bit specifically about Intel. Regular readers know that last January and February (see, for example, my Feb. 12 column ), I felt fairly strongly that the path of least resistance for the market was up. In fact, I opined that we could have the best rally of the entire bear market. But I stated at the time that it would just be a "rally" (however powerful).