Heebner had a very bad day. Sometimes running an unbalanced long-short portfolio can really bite you and today was his day for that. His longs went down and his shorts shot up. Even GRZZX beat him and it had a bad day. (Norbert will not be happy.)

I too am dubious of the Fin move. It seems a lot like short covering and we've seen that before. As Erryl correctly says other than some nice talk about how to prevent the "next" crisis nothing is new about the one we are in and that is what is important. Yet the performance of some beaten down Fins was phenomenal -- eg -- the badly battered ALD was up 14% today. (BTW Erryl ALD has had a lot of insider buying lately.)

The critical question for me is the oil and commodity selloff. The question seems to be: Is this just another hard selloff to be inevitably followed by a return to new highs as we've seen in the past and thus sooner or later a buying opportunity? I'm not sure. It seems to me the only way oil and commodities could selloff and stay down is if we are heading into a global recession or at least substantial slowdown.

As MP noted global growth favorites such as energy and miners had another bad day. But yet there were pockets of sunshine among the global growth gloom. The BDI was up more than 2% today. Shippers which depend on global growth also had great days -eg- DSX was +5.25%. Global Infrastructure giant GE gained 3.5% and SI more than 1%. So if global growth is coming to a screeching halt it was not a uniform market view today.

It is also worth noting that although oil and commodities failed to rally much, OIH, XLE and XME all began strong recoveries around 2:30PM that pared most of their losses. They closed well off their lows.

I share the views of MP and UH that I see enough contradictions in today's action that I am not yet certain this was anything more than a mild counter-trend rally like we've seen before. I need to see more. One final thought.

Remember: "Save the Bud Clydesdales. Belgians eat Horses."