After displaying a classic V-bottom reversal to what turned out to be a quick and anemic attempt by the bears to bring about a real correction, bullish fervor is becoming contagious, especially as the traditionally strong holiday season approaches. Indeed, the brief selloff was snatched up as a buying opportunity as I predicted it would, but my concerns about the market consolidating and struggling to hit new highs before year end were quickly dismissed. So, with nothing but blue skies overhead, will the party simply roll on?

As many investors enjoy the final weeks of summer, some optimistic bulls seem to be positioning themselves well ahead of Labor Day in anticipation of a fall rally. Indeed, last week’s action was impressive. After only a mere 4% correction, investors continued to brush off the disturbing violence both at home and abroad, and they took the minor pullback as their next buying opportunity.

Now that’s what I’m talking about. I have been discussing the overbought technical conditions of the S&P 500 for some time and the need for a pullback to test bullish support levels. And as many commentators have suggested, the more time between pullbacks, the more severe is the action when it finally arrives. Bears had become very hungry after a prolonged hibernation. This week offered up a nasty pullback.

More unnerving conflicts around the globe have flared up, but as usual, U.S. equity investors have given it nary a yawn as they seem to have become pretty much numb to the steady stream of unwelcome news, particularly out of the Middle East. Now we enter the summer version of earnings season.

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.

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.

Backed by positive economic announcements from the Empire Manufacturing Index and Industrial Production, along with much improved growth from Europe, the market broke its string of four losing sessions with the S&P gaining 0.6% and the recently weak Russell 2000 up a sturdy 1.2%. Virtually all sectors did well, led by Energy, Industrials and Financials.  Energy was up by more than 1%.

Today, Thanksgiving week was greeted with a marginally up day by the markets with the NASDAQ reaching a new high of 4007 before falling back below 4000 to close up nearly 3 points at 3995.57.  The S&P 500 reached a new all-time high at 1808.58 before ending the day down a little over 2 points at 1802.48.

Today, the SPY index closed at new highs while the S&P 500 was not able to make a new high, but closed strong, up about 0.3% on the day. The Russell 2000 (RUT) rebounded from a very weak performance over the past two weeks due to profit taking.  Today, it rose 1.15%, but volume was below average.