Shares of Cell Therapeutics, Inc. were on fire on Friday due to news on one of their drugs. Bakers Footwear Group Inc. (BKRS) - Shares of Bakers Footwear Group Inc. doubled after a better then expected earnings report. While I am sorely tempted to view what has happened at Apple and Amazon as vindication of my value judgments, I know better. With Apple, I do have a longer history and a better basis for believing that this is market bipolarity at play, with the boutiques near me price over shooting its value, after good news, and over correcting after bad news, but nothing that has happened to the company in the last two month would explain the correction. That crisis was devastating for the company and while it did recover somewhat in the years after, the bottom has clearly dropped out in the last two years, with Jeff Flannery at the top of the company. As you can see, GE was a solid but unspectacular investment from 1950 to 1980, and exploded in value in the 1980s and 1990s, with Jack Welch at its helm, and reached its most valuable company in the world status in 2001. Under Jeff Immelt, his successor, the stock continued to do well, but it dropped with the rest of the market as the dot com bubble burst, but then recovered leaving into the 2008 crisis.

In my (limited) reading of market analyses during the last four weeks, I have seen at least a half a dozen hypotheses about the stock swoon, from it being the Fed's fault (as usual) to a long overdue tech company correction to it being a response to global crises (in Italy and Saudi Arabia). NASDAQ stock quotes are delayed by at least 20 minutes. That may make you a more informed investor, or at least an investor with more information, but I am not sure that constant feedback is healthy for your portfolio, especially in periods like this one. As stocks have gone through contortions this month, more down than up, like many of you, I have been looking at my portfolio, wondering whether this is the crash that the market bears have been warning me about since 2012, just a pause in a continuing bull market or perhaps a prognosticator of economic troubles to come.

Take a breath: When faced with fast-moving markets, I have to force myself to consciously slow down. In my version of value investing, investors have to be ready to hold for long periods, but also be willing to close out positions sooner, either because their theses have been vindicated (by the market price moving towards value) or because their theses have broken down (in which case they need to revisit their valuations). If it is strong, they are willing to absorb the selling and it might take some time, else the stock is poised for a further up move. In keeping with the old adage of "trust, but verify", I decided to take a look at the data to see if there are answers in it to these questions. There is major resistance right now around $75. There is the possibility that this could be a delayed reaction to rates having gone up over the year already, with the 10-year treasury bond rate moving from 2.41% at the start of the year to 3.06% at the start of October 2018 and to a flattening yield curve (which has historically been a precursor to slower economic growth).