GOLD broke out on Friday following a 27% run up in the last three days as the dollar fell following the announcement that the Fed will add another $1 trillion to its balance sheet. Wall Street greeted the plan to buy mortgages and long term treasuries to force down long term interest rates with enthusiasm on Wednesday but profit taking brought a halt to the rally on Thursday and Friday.

A look at the NASDAQ chart shows how the index has respected the medium term trend line over the last 6 months and again turned down as it approached that line this week. The 2-standard deviation Bollinger Band (we show both 1 and 2-sd bands) has also proven to be a reliable indicator of turning points over that period.

The markets could turn up again on Monday when Treasury Secretary Geithner is expected to announce the details of the public-private partnership plan that he failed to provide details of a month ago. According to the New York Times, the plan has three main elements:

In one, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will set up special-purpose investment partnerships and lend about 85 percent of the money that those partnerships will need to buy up troubled assets that banks want to sell.

In the second, the Treasury will hire four or five investment management firms, matching the private money that each of the firms puts up on a dollar-for-dollar basis with government money.

In the third piece, the Treasury plans to expand lending through the Term Asset-Backed Secure Lending Facility, a joint venture with the Federal Reserve.

The most vexing aspect of this plan and in previous incarnations of the TARP has been how to price the troubled assets. The solution to be proposed is an auction in the expectation that competitive bidding will provide some protection to the taxpayer who is funding 85% of the plan. I expect that Wall Street will like the plan because it will get the assets off the banks books, but main street will hate it because of the extra burden on taxpayers, present and future. If I'm right,then we should see another significant rally in the financials next week.

New Industry Ranking Format

We've updated our industry analysis page to be consistent with the format adopted for our watchlist pages. The display no longer relies on Java which allows us to avoid using a pop-up window, which was always confusing for new subscribers, while still retaining the ability to sort columns to find the most improved industries.

The industry ranking page provides an easy way to find the best (and worst) performing industries on a daily basis, as well as over longer periods up to a year.

From the industry ranking page you are just one click away from seeing a list of stocks in the industry ranked by RS rank. Our RS Rank metric has proven to be the most important indicator of potential future performance.