Since the market ditched its typical Monday mania today, maybe we can escape the inevitable depression that has followed in its wake.

After selling into year-end market strength to close out the year, net weekly net insider trading transactions (the number of individual buyers minus sellers) has finished January on a slightly positive note, as many insiders appear to have taken advantage of the market weakness to increase their net holdings.

Forget that the market was down for the fourth consecutive week on Friday.  Investors woke up in a new world today and sent the market soaring.   It is Monday, after all.

The defensive posture taken by Sabrient’s fundamentals-based SectorCast-ETF model has allowed the long/short model portfolio to prosper in the face of the market weakness we’ve seen over the past week. The formerly hot Materials sector had begun to show signs of cooling off last week even as the overall market was hitting new highs, and over the past week it fell hard.

Perhaps it was the new senator from Massachusetts who let the bears out, but I suppose it was a bit more than that. When the week began on Tuesday, after the Martin Luther King holiday, the bulls were grazing happily on GARP stocks, as contented as California cows.  But then somebody opened that gate, and the bears roared through and the bulls ran for cover.

Several comments to this week’s article on SeekingAlpha  (“What the Market Wants:  A Week of Murk and Fog”) have prompted me to make a few points of clarification.

Last week brought us murk and fog in an otherwise bright New Year. All style/caps were down for the week, though not drastically. The worst was Small-cap Growth (- 1.12%); the best was Large-cap Growth (-0.6%); and the rest crowded between these uninspiring returns. But given the tremendous amount of cash on the sidelines, the market seems unlikely to turn disastrous.

The Claymore/Sabrient Insider ETF (NFO) has come to the attention of the ETF Professor after receiving the prestigous four-star rating from Morningstar: