Easy come, easy go

9:10 am (Hawaii) Is this a paper mache market today? I woke up a few times in the past few hours, checked volume, and went back to sleep. Traders who stepped in on Monday and early today made their profits, but beyond today, it's all fluff, I'm guessing. Though my Regular watch list is 82% green, just about every upside play has anemic volume. A few have similar volume to yesterday or volume that's close to average. But a large majority are up on hardly any trading. Major caution sign!

Monster Worldwide (MWW) is an exception. Big volume, nice candlestick. CYB (Wisdom Tree Chinese yuan fund) is also up on huge volume. I'm always interested in ways to play yuan long term. Anyone (not me) with a huge stack of benjamins in the bank has to think about buying a significant amount of yuan to hedge against inflation.

73% of my Metals list is green, but it's the same trap there with light volume. It's true that there have been big moves, week-long moves, right after stocks trade lightly. Maybe we just don't have any sellers left. Maybe China saving the Eurozone (temporarily) is enough. Maybe the Fed buying up Treasurys is enough. Maybe Nike beating expectations is plenty. But I'm not sold on this.

The one byproduct of today's gains (DJ +1.1%, Nas +1.3%, S&P +1.1%) is that silver's downward momentum has finally stopped, at least for today. GPL (+5.9%), EXK (+4.6%), AG (+2.7%), SIL (+2.5%), SLW (+2.4%, PSLV (+2.2%) all helping the miners sector. But it's hard to get excited when volume is so restrained.

Gold also has a bunch of healthy players, including NUGT (+2.9%), NGD (+2.3%) and GDXJ (+2%), but again, thin volume. XG and GG are up on massive volume. Crude oil is up. Copper is up. But on the whole, it all smells more like end-of-month buying by hedge funds to pretty up the books, not a legit turnaround. There isn't another clear catalyst in sight, which means we could see a slow meltdown for days to come. Perhaps weeks. Same scenario we had a week ago, but in slow-motion. It's thinnish markets like this that set up the average guy for a beatdown via flash crash. I'm content to be mostly cash and getting my sleep.