Monster rally...almost every industry up today

We may have seen one of the biggest rallies in decades today. The catalyst seems to have been the Geithner asset buying plan, which is somewhat similar to Warren Buffett's idea of providing low cost financing to private investors. In my opinion, this is as close to a free market solution as we will see (liquidationists will obviously prefer the free market solution of letting everyone fail but that's neither feasible nor desirable.) The question with this plan comes down to the degree of the transfer of wealth from taxpayers to private investors. The stock market loves it because it is money transferred from taxpayers to banks and investors (financials were the strongest sector today) but politicians shouldn't be blindly rewarding private investors and incompetently-run banks. If this plan fails, the US government will be forced to consider the nuclear option of nationalizing banks.

Almost every industry in America, using the Dow Jones classification system, was up strongly today. The only ones that were down were alternative energy, renewable energy equipment, and alternative electricity.



Days like today are why I said that shorts, as well as longs, will likely have a tough time this year.

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