Like that arcade game where kids whack the mole every time it pops its head up through the hole, the programs knocked the indices back each time they peeked over the line.

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The site now has 12, 000 members and has conducted more than 5, 000 live auctions over the past year, providing it with enough liquidity to start compiling real-time market trends and indices.

ECONOMIST: B2B exchanges

But with all of the indices at or near new all-time highs (save for the Nasdaq, perennially in the shadow of its mania highs north of 5000), many are beginning to wonder whether or not the secular bear that began 13 years ago has finally been slain.

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The DJIA wound up flirting with new highs for this bull market cycle while the market-leading Midcap and Smallcap indices once again marched to new all-time highs for the third day in a row.

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If two stockmarket indices always move linearly in the same direction at the same time, and the relative size of their movements is always the same, they have a perfect correlation of 1.

ECONOMIST: Unscrambling correlation

While nobody but the fast-money crowd enjoys a range-bound market, the fact that there is still a fair amount of uncertainty on any number of topics appears to be keeping the indices from straying too far in either direction at the present time.

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Being students of the charts, and of course of history itself, we are aware that there are long periods of time, anywhere from 10 to 20 years or longer, where the major equity indices do not break above previous highs.

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