Brief and tumultous flash correction is OVER

As of this PM, WTI Crude oil started to bounced back from the 100 level. There seems to be more manufactured fear and over-capitalized futures trading than real scarcity (North Sea Brent and OPEC related) of crude.

NDX was down 100 points in the last two sessions and SPY over 40 points.

HPQ contributed 1/3 of DOW losses today (after announcing 2010 Q4 report after market close last evening) with disappointing topline and bottomline, additionally lowering future estimates. This seems unrelated to management changes since the hyper-growth of the past few years were mostly related to newer products and lowered expectations and not to mention the paradigm shift that Apple brought to the PC/laptop market with the introduction of it's mega-seller, the iPad. Apple is now positioned to take a bite out of HP and Microsoft corporate sales. Additionally, corporations are going away from PC/laptops to cloud environments with a dumb terminal access which means that decade-long cycle of PC/laptop refreshes is giving way to refreshes of only the server-side hardware and software (cloud).

Confirmation mostly in terms of APPL/GOOG and POT/MOS bounce back from their near-term support levels of 165 and 75 respectively.

Damage done to the cost of buying options due to the 40%+ increase in VIX and VXN over the past two days.

Avoid OIH, XLE, SLV, GLD and all oil-sector stocks (XOM, SLB, BHI, CVX, etc.). Not sure if they will continue their way up because of "sustained" higher crude futures.

Stock options may be a better play as profits continue to top estimates. The caveat is that profit margins are at levels never seen before. If bottomlines continue to go up but toplines don't, further gains may be limited. Employment may need to pick up to see improvement in topline estimates. May be, topline estimates are a better guage of employment levels at this point (provided wage inflation isn't creeping in).

FFIV, AAPL, GOOG, MOS, POT seem like ones that will take off again.