Recommended reading during markets holiday this Memorial Day

Hope you're making it a meaningful Memorial Day! Many, like me, may have a family member who passed in service of country. We ask great things of those who put themselves on the line. Let's never forget that, and never forget them.

As U.S. markets are not open and many are observing this day in their own way, I'm taking it slow today as I hope many others are. For those who want to keep up with some interesting reading, I can suggest some articles for your perusal:

Quantizing The S&P 500 (Zero Hedge, 5/23/09) - Tyler Durden has done another yeoman's job of digging into relevant numbers, crunching them and describing what you probably should know about them in today's market.

An almost perfect storm (All Allan, 5/24/09) - Allan's lined up his Elliott Wave count with his technical indicators to get to a view that I'm tilting toward sharing. While trying to remain Unbiased of course! But I think he's seeing with his methods, something similar with what I'm seeing and presenting here recently. Not certain it's spot on with my thinking, but seems rather close.

By the way, I've also been considering the possibility that the rise of August-September, 2008, was a wave 2 (or B) from a leading diagonal. Those readers who are Elliotticians can appreciate this idea. It would be another way of lending support to the SPX channel that Allan shows (and yes, kinda looks like my SPX channel on my weekly bars chart, must be why I like it), and set up for the idea that a trendline from wave 4 back to wave 2 will provide the parallel trendline we'd see from the bottom of wave 3 (November 2008 lows?) to the bottom of wave 5. Just my commentary on Allan's views - check out his blogspot article (reference above) to see what he's thinking.

Schaeffer on Charts: RUT in a Rut? (Schaeffer's.com, 5/22/2009) - taking a look at the Russell 2000 which traders often overlook, with some special notes for options traders by comparing RUT implied volatility to SPX implied volatility.

"Own to Rent" Taking Place in Phoenix - (nakedcapitalism, 5/24/09 - Yves Smith has done it again. This one's about another twist (twist in the wind, perhaps) in the banking/tanking real estate saga of our times. I guess as "dbc" comments at SeekingAlpha, maybe it was weirdly savvy for banks to loan out so much, get bailed out for it, and then turn mortgage holders into tenants. Or not, given the banking index hasn't broken out (up) yet.

Highest and Lowest P/Es of the S&P 500 Companies: Average is 40.99 (Shocked Investor, 5/23/09) - Another take on the price/earnings ratio of the companies in the S&P 500 index.