'Dead Fish' on Parade

Editor's note: This column, which reflects market activity from the day before, originally appeared June 30 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.

The overnight markets were modestly lower, but that didn't stop us from having a nice preopening ramp job to salute the end of the quarter. Tech was especially hot, as a big dead-fish house raised its opinion of Intel(INTC Quote) this morning (more about that below). The early-going frenzy petered out around the time the Chicago Purchasing Management index printed slightly less than expected. However, I don't think that precipitated the slide. I think the complete and total bull of the preopening ramp job couldn't be maintained, and we started to sink.

For Whom the Bonds Forebode: About midday, we hit our lows, right around unchanged, and then the Dow and S&P bounced back close to the day's highs. But after that fizzled late in the afternoon, we wound up closing nearer to the lows, with the action in Nasdaq land slightly weaker. Intel finished on the low of the day, up about 20 cents, after having opened 70 cents higher. Otherwise, there was little worth pointing out, besides the suspicious weakness in housing land. If the bond market has peaked, those stocks could have seen their highs. Obviously, that would not bode well for economic action in the second half. In any case, it will be most interesting to see what the rest of the week brings in all these various markets. Tomorrow I'll share some quotes from one of the two stock market technicians that I pay attention to. ...