Last week ended with a thud as concerns about the Financial industry's foreclosure processes put a damper on the party that Google was trying to throw for everyone.

The market continues to defy gravity, and every small attempt by the bears to push it down – even in this moderate-volume trading environment – is swatted aside like a pesky mosquito and limited to one-day non-events. And now the market has its sights set on new 2010 highs, and it might just get there before some much needed profit-taking and support-testing sets in.

The market continues to try to suck in bears who are itching to short a rally that is long on optimism but short on volume and fundamental underpinnings. But each time it appears that a correction of significance is ready to start, a bid arrives with the slimmest of justification to sends the market to new heights. Despite market exuberance, my own technical analysis of the charts and Sabrient’s SectorCast-ETF fundamentals-based quantitative ranking of the ten U.S. sector iShares are both telling me that there is still much to worry about.

After last week’s Sector Detector article in which I talked about the “relentlessly strong September” making the market quite overbought from a technical standpoint, it looked like the market was going to waterfall into a healthy correction on Thursday. But alas, the bulls pulled a rabbit out of their hat and closed the week with a flourish.

A relentlessly strong September is making the market quite overbought from a technical standpoint. So much for September being historically the worst month of the year for stocks. But it now appears to be at a crossroads. And Sabrient's quantitative SectorCast rankings are even more defensive this week.

Bulls put up a valiant offensive in the last 20 minutes of trading on Tuesday to push the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJX) back above the 10,000 level as the month of August came to a close. For the last six days of August, bears either succeeded or gamely tried to penetrate this psychologically important level intraday only to be repelled by the bulls.

As I pointed out back in June, cash on hand among S&P 500 companies has been at record levels, and up 25% over the same time last year. One would presume that such cash levels would eventually be used for share buybacks, M&A, or dividend increases – all of which would impact the market favorably.

It is surely understandable if an investor is afraid to participate in this choppy stock market. Bounces from support are met with selloffs from resistance. In 2008, we got a strong downtrend, and in 2009, we got a strong uptrend, but this year has been difficult to gauge.

Amazingly, the market has given us four major trend changes in the past month alone, which apparently hasn't happened with such frequency in over 10 years. Last week, the market was staring into the proverbial abyss as the S&P 500 incurred the dreaded “death cross,” in which the 50-day moving average of price crossed down through the longer-term 200-day moving average.