For mental health reasons, we hardly ever watch CNBC anymore. But glancing at it this afternoon, at one point we saw three separate live graphics displaying the price of crude oil. So much screen space was taken up by live oil trackers, there wasn’t enough space left to show the chart of whatever alternative energy company they were pumping.

Was oil making a new high today? Did the U.S. unilaterally attack another country?  Did someone accidentally double-park in the Strait of Hormuz?  No.

If you feel like it’s been impossible to get away from oil and oil-related stories for too many years to count, that’s because you’re right. The CXO blog has a nice report up on a momentum-based sector investing strategy, and as they explain, the primary reason the strategy massively outperforms the S&P over the

Today was a replay of yesterday with bulls doing more news cherry-picking [Durable Goods orders better than expected] while buying toward the close again perhaps from the same unknown source.

Don’t ya love headline writers? This one’s from MarketWatch.

Anyway, volume remains sluggish and breadth unimpressive.

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Some traders were getting out of Wall Street early today they head to their cozy weekend digs in the Hamptons. I wonder if they bitched about the cost of gas getting there or their recent utility bill. Anyway, things were relatively quiet as I suspect stabilization policies at trading desks were in place.

Volume was light and breadth just okay. The heavier upside volume versus advance/decline issues in the NASDAQ probably meant investors were chasing the bigger names.

Now that oil’s only $130 we can all relax right? You might recall that when oil reached $80 in the summer of 2006 stocks fell. Subsequently prices fell bottoming below $60 as 2007 began then stocks rallied. We’ve had successively higher moves followed by some backing and filling and stocks have followed inversely at …