Today was a hugely dispiriting day given that the lion's share of earnings announcements were quite good. Plus the breadth of the good ones, ranging from Texas Roadhouse (TXRH) and Denny's (DEN) to Disney (DIS) to Mallinckrodt (MNK), should have inspired some buying.
But you knew from the get-go, with the tremendous selling in Apple (AAPL) as well as all the semiconductors, that there were people blowing down the doors to get out.
I think the telling thing about today's session is that there is no one bidding underneath in some very important stocks, like Skyworks (SWKS) or Qorvo (QRVO) or Avago (AVGO), to name three winners with good quarters. You have the growth pharmas, like Valeant (VRX) and Actavis (ACT), getting slammed. The restaurants and retailers still cannot hold their bids after two days of trying to stabilize.
We've seen these periods before. Nothing seems to be working and then you get a session like Friday, one of those rip-your-face-off sessions, and we forget all about these days.
Still, though, I am hard-pressed to know which side is going to prevail because, for now, after a day like today, you come away thinking Friday was the outlier.
Action Alerts PLUS, which Cramer co-manages as a charitable trust, is long AAPL and ACT.