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Stay Focused on This Price Action

The action today is a good illustration of the importance of keeping an open mind about market direction.
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It has been a very steady uptrend all day with the indices hovering around their highs and breadth running about 5350 gainers to 1800 decliners. There are around 280 new 12-month highs which is a little light given how close the indices are to all time highs, but there is plenty of strong action. Even the biotechnology names that have been lagging for the past 10 days are finally finding buyers.

I'm looking for more inventory to add into the close but I'll be waiting until the final hour before I do much new. I am still holding Twitter (TWTR) and will be looking for add points as it develops here. I believe that this earnings report marks a significant change in Twitter much like the recent news for Disney (DIS) and Qualcomm (QCOM) were major shifts for those stocks. All three are now momentum names and that means they will trade differently than when there were just another stodgy big cap.

The action today is a good illustration of the importance of keeping an open mind about market direction. Many market players have been taught by traditional Wall Street that you should formulate some sort of market thesis and then look for reasons to support it. Recently it has been very easy to come up with a bearish thesis and it is understandable why some pundits will predict that the market is heading for trouble.

Ultimately the bears will eventually be right but the much more important issue is timing and that is where your focus should be. When the bears failed to gain any traction the last few days that was the clue that a day like this might be coming. Simply being open minded about the possibility would help you tremendously versus a dogmatic view about how the market was heading for a tumble.

We will see how things close today but action like this creates great anxiety among both bears and underinvested bulls. Markets that move like this don't suddenly reverse and go straight down. It is a good idea to understand what the negative arguments might be but stay focused on this price action and worry more about what can go right rather than what can go wrong.

(Disney is a holding in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS member club. Want to be alerted before Jim Cramer buys or sells DIS? Learn more now.)

At the time of publication, James DePorre was Long QCOM, TWTR.