Some Bears Got Trapped in the Hunt for the Elusive Bottom

Rarely has the saying, "the market makes fools of us all" been truer. While a rally Friday lifted the Dow by 3.6% and the Nasdaq by nearly 5%, it was in a shortened and sparsely attended session marked by a relatively in-line jobs report and relief that there was no major terrorist incident Thursday.

Considering stocks' harrowing declines in recent weeks, the spurt was too little and too late to keep a great number of erstwhile gurus from looking premature in calls for the market's bottom.

I'm not (just) talking about those longtime bulls who steadfastly declared the Sept. 21 lows -- which both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite violated this week -- were "the lows" and the beginning of a "new bull market." (Folks like Don Hays of Hays Advisory Group who Wednesday recommended doing some "insurance-policy" selling, causing some readers to declare a towel had been thrown. But Hays continues to recommended 100% stocks for aggressive investors (intact since Sept. 26) and declared: "If this is a major bottoming period as I strongly expect, it will be easy to reinvest the proceeds as soon as the momentum of this wave of Nasdaq capitulation runs its course." In other words, the only toweling Hays did was of the sweat on his brow.) ...