Stocks ended last week on a high note, closing a smidge above strong resistance at 1900 for the S&P 500, which set a new closing high for the large-cap index, albeit on low pre-holiday volume. With the Memorial Day holiday giving us a short week of trading, all eyes are on voting in Ukraine, where a decisive win for billionaire business tycoon Petro Poroshenko seems assured.

The sudden bearish turn last week in the market -- after hitting new highs the prior week -- has come fast and furious as selloffs are wont to do. And the pullback might have further still to go. But there are several reasons to expect a stabilization or bounce during this holiday-shortened week, and in any case I still expect that it eventually will turn out to be a great buying opportunity leading to higher prices later in the year.

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.

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.

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 continued last week to seek some firmer footing, as prices found some support and volatility hit some resistance, and a flight to safety of global capital benefited long-term Treasury bonds -- the very assets that are supposed to be selling off in a secular “Great Rotation” into equities.

The S&P 500 seemed to hit a wall at 1800, retreating after the all-time, but rebounded to close only 0.38% down. It could be just a pause or it could be a bit more serious due the plethora of earnings reports this week from the Consumer Discretionary sector.  Today, URBN began what will be a veritable deluge of retail sector earnings reports this week