Stocks R Us

In one of my rare moments of sound on CNBC today, I was rewarded with an extended discussion about how to buy real estate in Spain. No kidding. This is what the US equity market and it's chief media exponent has come to, buying real estate in Spain. Note to Bob Prechter, this is NOT a top.

Bob Prechter for those who are too young to remember the markets of the 80s and 90s, is a market analyst turned social scientist who was mainly responsible for the popularization of the Elliott Wave Theory of technical analysis, a pattern recognition technique that has the remarkable attribute of never being wrong, because there always is an "alternate count" that amazingly and exactly correlates with the market's twists and turns......In retrospect. Prechter became famous being a bull in the eighties and a bear ever since. Or a bear ever since he recommended to his subscribers to, "Go Long" on the Friday before the crash of October 19, 1987. But enough of that, other then I was a faithful subscriber of Prechter's, circa 1984 through 1988.

So what I am trying to reconcile here is where the US stock market is headed, when the dominant stock TV coverage is obsessed with real estate in Spain, and Las Vegas, and Miami and Omaha. Where once commercial time on CNBC was filled with truck drivers striking it rich on Silicon Valley IPO's, now we are entertained with cute ads touting on-line poker. When it served his dire paradigm, Prechter labeled such cultural trends as indicative of a change from bull to bear markets. If there is a scentila prescience in such insights, based on what our talking suits and low cut blouses are filling the airwaves with these days, back up the truck, we're going to have one heck of a summer rally. You see once the real estate boom becomes fodder for banality, the flow of financial speculation will once again turn to our time honored American tradition of Google and Company.

Just in case though, a Spanish dictionary may not be a bad idea.