The wise prosper in the Wild West

Cna you imagine what it's like to wake up with 2 hours left in the market most mornings? And then to see nothing but blood all over your screen?

Ah, green is a great color. It's not surprising today, of course, not with the action we saw yesterday. I went ahead and started a list of my A and A- grade picks to see how they all fared coming off their lows of yesterday (August 16).

AAPL 121 • low 111 • up 9%

AMZN 74 • low 70 • up 6.5%

CROX 50 • low 44 • up 15.1%

GRMN 93 • low 86 • up 7.6%

RIMM 211 • low 184 • up 14.3%

I'm still trying to lift my jaw off the floor. I'm sure there are a few other amateurs like me who didn't have the dry powder to jump in yesterday even though every fiber in our bodies said "GO!" A lesson well learned about market tops. No matter how great the company, and how impressive the earnings, every market has its top. Just like a cinder-cone volcano. It has to blow. Just takes a tiny spark, whether it's a mortgage massacre or anything else.

Seeing Crocs and Under Armor rip to 15% gains off yesterday's lows is just incredible, but not shocking.

BIDU 177 • low 161 • up 10%

CEO 101 • low 92 • up 10%

CMG 99 • low 92 • up 8.5%

FLS 66 • low 62 • up 6.7%

GOOG 498 • low 480 • up 3.6%

NILE 74 • low 71 • up 5.2%

NTDOY.PK, ask 53.10, bid 53.25 • low 51.95 • up 2.2%

UA 63 • low 54.50 • up 15.8%

I am surprised a bit that Blue Nile is slow to move with them, but maybe there are just more doubters now than there were one or two weeks ago when the stock nearly hit 100. The parallel between NILE and AMZN isn't totally off. When Amazon first rolled out, bears swore that it would be crushed by Barnes & Noble and Borders. Same is true of Blue Nile with Tiffany's and Zale, who could enter the online battle at any time. But they won't, not until NILE has continued to establish its territory in cyberspace.

The only other factor holding Blue Nile back is insider selling, including a sale of more than 320,000 shares by its CEO. Same pattern by CROX execs: blowout quarters, reward follows. Investors get their gains, too, even as shorts cry foul.

NILE is one of the very few stocks trading down for the day, minus 1.6% to 73.84. Talk about a steal.

Anyway, to those of you who stayed dry yesterday and today and loaded up the truck, congratulations. Think I'll go scrape some quarters off the floor of my car to get more Nintendo, which is still at a huge discount after Tokyo followed the Dow's selloff yesterday.