It was all about the financials again this week.

Citigroup reported over $8 billion in losses for the most recent quarter and announced it was splitting up into two entities: one to concentrate on core investment and banking activities, credit cards and high net worth individuals and another to hold all "non-core" businesses like real estate lending, private branded credit cards, various kinds of consumer lending (CitiFinancial, Primerica, student loan and auto lending) and most of the toxic waste currently dragging down the balance sheet. In addition, Citi did a deal to sell majority interest in its brokerage unit Smith Barney to Morgan Stanley. There was a whiff of desperation there as Smith Barney was actually one of Citi's profitable businesses.

As if that wasn't exciting enough, we had Bank of America receiving another 11th hour bailout from the Treasury. BofA claimed that without it they wouldn't be able to complete the acquisition of Merrill Lynch. BofA then announced a $1.79 billion 4th quarter loss and that didn't even include an approximately $15 billion loss at Merrill. Looks like buying both Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch might not have been such great ideas after all.

Before we leave the financials, which as a group fell 16% this week, we should note that JP Morgan-Chase announced disappointing earnings and downbeat guidance. This, from the strongest player in the financial sector.

There were a few other things going on this week. Intel reported a 90% drop in earnings including a huge writedown on their Clearwire investment. Management indicated that there was no visibility for near-term revenue but that eventually things would improve. That slight wisp of hopefulness was enough to give the shares a boost.

With respect to the economic reports for the week, December retail sales were about twice as bad as expected. Initial jobless claims jumped again this week. Our trade deficit narrowed, revealing an $8.7 billion drop in exports - no wonder our manufacturing reports have been so awful lately.

In any case, stocks fell several percent this week and our TradeRadar indicators, for the most part, reflect this current fragility in the market.

TradeRadar Alert HQ Stock Market Statistics --

Each week our Alert HQ process scans over 7400 stocks and ETFs and records their technical characteristics. Primarily we look for BUY and SELL signals for our free stock alerts; however, we also summarize the data in order to gain insights in the week's market action.