I know the media has reported that the commercial paper market has “stabilized” this week. In fact, even Chairman Bernanke said so in his testimony before Congress last Thursday. At the time, I told you I thought that was bullshit. Everyone keeps cherry picking the CP data they want. Usually it has to do with outstandings and that is a very dangerous way to look at things. I evaluate outstandings, the yield curve, the spread and the maturity distribution to get a more balanced view. So I just thought I’d post some pictures of CP “stabilizing” from the Federal Reserve Commerical Paper website. Does this look like stability to you?

Unlike most market participants, I am not a huge fan of buybacks. So it was fun for me to read what Jeff Matthews had to say at his blog the other day. If you don’t know what I am talking about, here’s the link. I’ll be following this up with another post in my Buyback Pushback series.

Like everyone else, I was expecting to see very little action today until the rate decision. But this narrow range and light volume is off the charts - almost literally off the charts. Maybe we should just close the markets in the first half of FOMC days and get some extra sleep! But since we are here, I had a chance to look over enough charts to question my newly established bullish bias. I am obviously sticking with it but today’s vacuum of volatility is unsettling and if we hadn’t stayed above the high close over the past three weeks, I’d be even more nervous. Enjoy your last few moments of calm before the storm! One is coming.

First off, my apologies to all of you that either hate sports or hate sports analogies being interjected into normal life. I’ll keep this brief but cannot help myself. For years I have slipped away from NBA basketball. It’s a little much to watch multimillionaires who too often spend their time on the court with minimal effort and then spend their time in the postgame interviews making great efforts to blame someone else or suggest that they need to be motivated better. It’s as if they aren’t playing for anything and aren’t having fun. The bulls in this market seem to be mimicking this behavior - minimal effort during the trading day, they don’t seem to be having fun and then in the post-bell interviews I hear a lot of complaints about not being able to get motivated to buy stocks. OK - so the bulls have made a lot of money lately but now is no time to lose sight of what they are playing for and it should never be the case to forget how fortunate we are to be able to play this game. This NBA postseason I decided to adopt the Mavericks and I wish the bulls would do the same. And to be fair, the bears would benefit from it too. Ok, I admit it - I want everyone to support the Mavs and if you can’t, please just watch a few minutes of one of their games and you’ll get something out of it. The Mavs’ effort is intense and it is non-stop. They are focused and yet, they are having fun. So if you really need to get motivated to play in this stock market, tune into the Mavs on TNT tonight at 8:30 EDT and watch the kind of intensity that would do us all some good every trading day from 9:30 am to 4:00 pm.