Bulls continue to climb their wall of worry, as uncertainty from the latest “bricks in the wall” created by Russia in Crimea, slowing growth in China, and Fed tapering fades into the mosaic.

Today was another surprise Monday.  Short sellers who thought a rough weekend in Ukraine might stir up the war drums again were wrong.  In addition, China took several steps to boost its economy, and the domestic economic reports were fairly positive.  As a result, the shorts capitulated at the opening and risk was on.  The day ended led by the DJI (every stock was positive!), up more than 1%, with the S&P 500 up nearly 1% and the NASDAQ up about 0.8%

The weakness last week in U.S. stocks was entirely expected. As I mentioned in last weekend’s article, the technical condition had become quite overbought and the market was overdue to take a breather and pull back a bit. Also, our SectorCast rankings had moved from bullish to a more neutral bias.

Today was the beginning of “spring break” for the market.  At least it seemed that way with a very low trading volume of only 600M shares on the NYSE.  Either the college crowd does more trading than we imagined or parents are taking the week off as well.

After a requisite knee-jerk selloff, stock market bulls shook off Russia’s military action in Ukraine and Crimea as just another buying opportunity. Even adding the Russian Bear to their arsenal couldn’t give bears the upper hand for long. The S&P 500 large cap index set yet another all-time intraday high and closed at a new record high on Friday.

Today brought three better than expected economic releases from Construction Spending, ISM Manufacturing, and Personal Income. The ISM figure was quite unexpected and Personal Income was well above expectations.  If we ignore for a moment that the Final GDP reading for Q4 was lowered on Friday (which may or may not have been primarily caused by severe weather), we have had a week of better than expected economic numbers.

Facing formidable resistance and the threat of an ominous triple-top sell signal if bulls lost their battle, U.S. stocks appear to have successfully navigated a critical crossroads by finding the wherewithal to break out to new highs, with blue skies above. Among the ten U.S. business sectors, the performance leaders last week were Consumer Services, Consumer Goods, Industrial, and Financial.

The market's major equity indices were all up a little more than 0.6% yesterday, which was off mid-day highs, but positive because the market shrugged off poor economic news from China. Today, the market stayed relatively even, with the S&P 500 ending down slightly by -0.13%.

Stocks continue to consolidate just under their prior high, which is offering formidable resistance. Although many long-standing uncertainties have significantly subsided, others have arisen, including turmoil in a new global hot spot (Ukraine) and the disruptions to the economy caused by the unusually long and brutal winter experienced by most of the U.S.

Last week, stocks continued their rebound from the edge of the abyss. Investors responded positively to a dovish combination of comments from Speaker of the House John Boehner and new Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen. Mr. Boehner said he would not pursue another acrimonious battle over the debt ceiling. And Ms.