I have to tell you it is almost uncanny how every recent correction has played out almost identical. We've been talking about this for the past month - first goes the weak sisters of retail, financials, and homebuilders (the "early cycle recovery" stocks), then come the non early cycle but non commodity (tech is a great example), and everyone runs into commodities as a "safe haven" while the rest of the market crumbles. At which point, the bears come to the safe havens and maul the last group hiding. (that stage has happened over the past week)

Then we move to the next stage where the hedge funds, flush with the governments 'easy print' cash need to find someplace to run up, so they go back to the early cycle names (along with short covering). Aside from yesterday which appears to be a situation that was specific to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we seem to have been entering that phase the past week - these sectors, if not rallying, stopped going down. Only homebuilders were lagging. And most joined the party today.

The only thing missing this time around has been that truly "watershed" selloff where all parties are indited. Maybe it happens, or maybe the 6 weeks straight of selling was the watershed, just in a rotational pattern. I don't know. But in weeks like this (where as I wrote the indexes would hold up, or even rise) and our global growth portfolio would get smashed, while our Ultrashorts in Retail, Commercial Real Estate, and Finance would blow up in our face (at the tail end of the corrective process) we'd have performance like this -- index +1%, Rising Tide Growth -6%. And I'd kick the proverbial dog. To allay this to some degree, I've tried to add a small barbell approach (owning some "junk" sectors) while as discussed and you can see in our holdings, completely slashed short exposure to the bad sectors in the past week. In fact, we've gone so far as to go long the Financials (for a trade). Well we're still getting our head handed to us, but it's not quite as bad as the previous iterations. I am simply amazed that the pattern is playing out so identical - usually on Wall Street, once a pattern is detected it's exploited and becomes useless very quickly. You can see today the short covering in the Crocs (CROX), in the Under Armour (UA) etc - all the most beaten down merchandise flying.