They went up the previous week.

They went up the week before that.

What can I say? The markets keep going up.

Sound familiar? That's how I began last week's column and it's equally appropriate this week. Who knows, I may get more value out of that sentence next week.

The bulls have been on a tear since the markets bottomed in mid March. They really have. The Dow is now up in 21 of the past 24 sessions.

There was a post in a trading blog I was reading this week which pointed out just how uncommon such an uninterrupted march is . . .

only twice in the 20th century have we seen comparable runs, both of which occurred way back in the 1920s and both of which ended in tears shortly after. That doesn't mean we're on the cusp of another correction . . . you can't deduce anything from such a small sample size.

Still, I just don't see the edge in getting aggressively long at this stage. I've had a boring week for that very reason . . . good set-ups are hard to "nd when almost every stock is so extended. As a result, I made just two trades this week, both of which gave the trading coffers a modest bulge.

The first was the Yahoo short I was eyeing up last week. The stock's high point has been just shy of $29 since reporting earnings last month and I was looking to get short on a weak climb to the same juncture. No sooner was my order hit than the stock fell away again. I had to laugh.

A trader can't ask for a better entry than that.

The stock's April low is at $27.37 and I was hoping to take partial profits just above this point.

Unfortunately, my luck ran out and the stock, having made it as low as $27.53 on Tuesday, reversed back up the following day. I only ever relax when I've taken some pro"ts and brought my stop loss up to the break-even point. As it is, I'm up a modest amount but still at risk of losing on the trade. My stop is just above $30.50.

My only other trade this week was a very brief affair which couldn't have gone much better. I've been bored out of my wits this week, waiting in vain for any sort of pull-back. On Tuesday, the Dow saw some selling and I decided to try a day trade.

Professional day traders of the main indices look at daily 'pivot points' to help determine where buying and selling might occur. I'm not going to bore readers with technical mumbojumbo here. Suf"ce to say that these points are eagerly watched by traders. Anyway, selling on Tuesday saw the price hit a possible support level, which is where I jumped in.

I rarely day-trade and entered as much out of boredom and curiosity as anything else. As a result, I took a small position with a tight stop (max loss of just 150). As luck would have it, I got in at almost the exact bottom.

The Dow had been in a down-trend all day, sucking in a host of short sellers in the process. When prices reversed and took out the day's high, the shorts began to panic and cover their positions (or as one trader I was talking to put it, "shorts are puking up the market").

I closed out the position when the price made it as high as another of the so-called pivots, netting myself a handy 500 in the process. Not bad for two hours' work. As it happened, the buying continued on Wednesday, with the Dow surging another 100 points or so higher. I'm not complaining though.

There's been a lot of talk this week about the old 'Sell in May and go away' syndrome. Market historians blather on about how the following six months tend to be weak ones historically. I don't buy into this stuff.

A lot of these results are just historical freaks. Going long or short purely on the basis of the month of the year is, in my humble opinion, for simpletons.

The market is deeply overbought at the moment so May might very well see some selling, but it won't be because of some inexplicable seasonal quirk. I realise that some people swear by this stuff, but I think it gives market timing a bad name.

Whatever about dodgy seasonal arguments, the bears do have some serious ammunition. This market has come too far, too fast and the fundamentals are nothing to get excited about. Still, the potential for continued gains is there as long as there is widespread scepticism about the integrity of the recent rally.

I was amazed to see the recent poll from the American Association of Individual Investors which shows that bears outnumber bulls by a ratio of two to one. The AAII is made up of small, typically clueless investors.

They're a sheepish bunch who are almost invariably bullish when the market is topping and bearish when the market is bottoming. It's very rare to find a bearish reading in a bullish market. Such a bearish reading implies there remains a lot of money on the sidelines that may yet be put to work.

Anyway, my strategy is unchanged . . . look for a mixture of longs and shorts but favour the long side if we get a decent pull-back. I prefer holding for days or weeks rather than hours, but may try a few more day trades on the indices if the market continues to hang around these lofty heights.

Weekly gain/loss: + 750 Overall balance: 39,400