When I awoke this morning I had to stop and think what day it was.  When I realized it was finally Friday a sense of relief came over me.  It's been one of those weeks where it has been difficult to figure out what in the world was happening beneath the surface of the market.  I'm just hoping that today isn't too freaky.

I remember first watching that movie (and the other 20 Disney movies that our local video/electronics/tire & auto/restaurant) carried in the early 1980's on a machine that looked something like this:

Hey, for a family living in a town of 12,000 people in the far northeast corner of Colorado, I thought we were pretty advanced.  We even bought a "portable" computer around the same time:

I remember selecting that computer after getting to test two different computers over the weekend at our house.  The decision came down to the fact that this thing could be moved from room to room and nobody liked using that crazy thing called a mouse that was an integral part of this new invention called the "Macintosh".  Too bad that the computer never left the computer desk in all the years that we owned it. 

(Detour: that is the machine where I built my first database.  I remember spending most of the summer plugging in my 700+ baseball card collection into a database I created.  I could then printout a list of cards I was missing as well as a list of duplicates I wanted to trade.)

Anyway, back to the market.  What does this have to do with anything besides making me feel old and reminding us how quickly technology changes?

This has been a week where normal patterns have been flipped around and twisted.  The "risk-off" trade has been in vogue underneath the surface for the past couple of weeks.  This week we've seen the "risk-on" trade suddenly catch a bid (for a day) and then yesterday we saw a battle all day long between the risk on and risk off trades.  Long-term Treasury bonds were stuck in the middle of this trade, trading everywhere from +0.75% to -1.05% intra-day before settling flat for the day.  Commodities had been following the direction of stocks for the better part of two years, but that relationship has broken down this week.  We've seen commodities, including Precious Metals, all over the place this week. 

We even have had a dot-com IPO double in one day, while the Chinese IPO bubble appears to be bursting before our eyes.  (I wonder if Communist China has a version of  "Linked In"....they've seemed to have some sort of government controlled version of every other internet site we have.)

There is clearly an allocation shift battle going on in conference rooms all over Wall Street.  Granted, we are entering the worst seasonal part of the year, QE2 is ending in 5 weeks, and the outlook for the economy is murky.  Of course individual investors have been much more enthusiastic in 2011 than they were in 2009 & 2010.  That's always a good sign, right?

The craziness continues over in Europe as the odds of a default write down recharacterization from Greece (and probably Portugal and Ireland)increases without the controversy out of the chief European bailout supporter, the IMF.  Two year yields on Spanish government bonds have jumped to 3.6% (would you lend Spain money for 2 years at that rate?)  Greece's 10 year bonds are up to nearly 17% again. 

Investors over there are fleeing bonds of those countries and investing them in German bunds.  The 10 year yield in Germany is now down to 3.12%, below the 10 year rate on US Government bonds.  Now I know the US has problems, but why in the world would investors require LESS money from a country that is ultimately tied to the success or failure of the United Socialist States of Europe European Union?  

Maybe we can get through the last day of the crazy week without too much damage.  Oh wait, we still have to get through "Judgment Day" tomorrow.  (Does anybody else find it ironic that these people have supposedly studied the Bible and broken the code to the exact day of judgment, yet Jesus' own words said, "Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man comes." [Matthew 25:13])

Here's hoping that this video is the worst part of the day (I dare you to not be singing this all day):