Feeble Breakout....

Stocks staged a feeble breakout today on better than expected existing home sales and continued speculations on the Ambac bailout as I have expected yesterday. The breakout took the Dow up 189.20 points, above the strong 30MA resistance level but on much lesser than impressive volume. In fact, many of the winners today were beaten back in after hours trading. This shows that investors are still not convinced that this is the point where the market turns around... neither am I. As long as analysts are still debating whether or not the US economy is already in a recession or that if an academically defined recession is around the corner, the market will not be ready for a full scale turn around. The rest of the week is expected to be volatile as more heavy weight economic data get released (see economic calendar). On the technical front, I would need to see a strong followup tomorrow on rising volume before I validate this breakout.