Jim:    Did the commodity stocks... the fertilizers, the coals, the oils, the aluminums... did they hit bottom yesterday? Did they bounce today for real? I mean, they all seemed to roar ahead, from this morning until the close... as if the last month's losses were, at last, put behind them...

But here's the hilarious thing...

The prices of the commodities... including crude oil and natural gas... well, you know what they did today?... They went down!... Down... despite the hurricane... despite oil inventories that showed a huge demand for more gasoline, which will always mean, in a couple of weeks, that we need more oil...

So what's the story?... How could the stocks go up, and the commodities that underlie them go down?...

Simple. There's a matrimonial difficulty here... The stocks have divorced themselves from the fundamentals... The underlying businesses they're in are different from the stocks and the way they're trading... And the stocks of the commodity companies are now totally under the control of gigantic hedge funds. And, today, maybe what they did was remarry the hedge funds. Many of the hedge funds have more capital, and are larger, and have more money than the stocks they are actually trading... They're overwhelming the vehicle, that is the stock, to get in or get out...

As they say in Highlights... what's wrong with this picture?...

In everything commodity-related, if you're thinking of buying, you know what you face? You face an invisible enemy who is out to get you... To me, that enemy is not necessarily the shorts, although no one likes them one bit... It's not the fundamentals... The declines in the commodity stocks have far outpaced the declines in the prices of the commodities themselves... In fact, the Oil Services Index (OIH) hasn't been this low since oil was at $66. That's $40 below here...

No!... You face a fifth column, whenever you contemplate buying a Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK) for natural gas, or a Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU) for coal... or, yes, a Foster Wheeler (FWLT*), which I own for my charitable trust... Memo to staff, get me another whip, because I deserve that one...

I believe you're new enemy is the new breed of trigger-happy shareholders. They're the ones who are killing me... they're whipping me...

See, the trigger-happy sellers, and the buyers... they make it hard to figure out the right place to pay for these stocks...

There's always a price where stocks are cheap versus the businesses. We know that. The bank stocks wildly overshot that price because of forced selling back in July before the bottom on July 15th... Now the question is, have the commodity stocks overshot where they belong, because of the same forced selling by these insane quick-draw McGraws (trigger-happy shareholders)?... who have lost control of their assets, the clients and, most important... take it from me, their minds...

I keep telling myself that there has to be a price where these companies... these companies are all making really good money. You know, these are not losing money... they're making fortunes. There's got to be a price, I think, where they would be taken over in a heartbeat by other companies that are trying to consolidate the industry. I mean, there's a price for you...

The problem, thanks to these shareholders, is that I don't have the faintest clue about what that price is... That's what makes it so darn hard to be a buyer of anything related to the commodities in the market... or a seller. You look stupid no matter what. The collapse... which mirrors the collapse of the early-cycle stocks, going into July 15th... is happening so swiftly, and with such brutality, that stocks like Freeport-McMoRan (FCX*), a mineral play that I own for my charitable trust, and have owned for years, could drop 10 points, a 15% loss, in the blink of an eye, even though it seems to be making boat loads of cash...  flush as can be... Tempting, given that I'm hearing that it's possible that the Chinese will come back in, and start buying minerals... and start buying coal... and start buying steel... and start buying Molybdenum, whatever the heck that is... and announce a big stimulus plan right after the end of the ParaOlympics.

But that's just conjecture too. You can go out for a cup of coffee, or maybe a soft pretzel... when Potash (POT) is at $140... and, you know, it'll be at $120 by the time you get back to your desk, giving you a heck of an opportunity to hurl... and the need for a fresh pair of Depends...

The selling is so hot and heavy, with volumes in stocks showing that everybody and his brother is selling - overwhelming the buyers - that I can't send you out to that field of battle without a steel helmet and, of course, body armor...

In my experience, the only way to try to make money off these stocks right now is to stick to the same discipline that would have made you money heading into the July 15th lows for the banks and the homebuilders and the retailers... By the way, did you see that Bob Toll (CEO) bought 600,000 shares of Toll Brothers (TOL)?...

You buy these stocks as they come in, slowly and on a wide scale... a wide scale meaning you wait for the stock to fall until you get a little rally... by a substantial amount. You do not buy at $39, then $38, then $37, then $36... Before you pull the trigger, you leave a wide scale...

But, in this market, with the commodity stocks in freefall, despite a brief respite today, the hard thing to figure out is, what is a substantial decline?... What scale is wide enough?...

Let me give you a really embarrassing example, so you know how hard it is for this professional...

I bought 100 shares of the so-named Foster Wheeler (FWLT*), which of course has now morphed from this (bull), into an absolute this (bear)... It's a stock I've backed ever since it came out of bankruptcy. I recommended it on my radio show... A good infrastructure play with a fat order book... I bought 100 shares at $40, two days ago for my charitable trust...

Now, after a painful debate with myself, about whether $30 was the next place to buy it... whether I should use a 10-point scale, waiting for the stock to lose an unbelievable quarter of its value before I buy again, I decided I couldn't take the pain at all, and I sold 100 shares into strength today, at about $35...

Hey, listen, it rallied a tad from yesterday's debacle, which saw it down more than any other Nasdaq stock on a percentage basis... ouch-y...

I'm not suffering from buyer's remorse, I'm not suffering from seller's remorse... I'm not suffering from anything... I just wanted to sidestep what it feels like... what it feels like the inevitable drop to $30 will be... I figured I could sell it there, and buy it back when it does go lower... Of course, I wish I hadn't bought it at $40 at all... But how hard is this market for anything commodity-dependent, that I could be that wrong? I screwed up because I couldn't figure out the right price. I still like FWLT*. I still own a decent size position in the charitable trust... I think this company is pretty amazing... Listen to this... $10 in cash, no debt, usually profitable, I think it earns $4 a share. You back out the $10, right... and you've got FWLT* trading, well, at $25... That's 6x earnings... 6x earnings for a company with $10 (per share on the books) in cash? I mean, come on... It's just trading a little more than 6x earnings. That's enormously cheaper than the soft goods stocks that the market's falling in love with... Sorry, that's nuts too. It's too cheap. It has a retiring CEO... Hey, listen, when the guy leaves... he turned it around... someone just might buy the whole thing for the cash and order book. If it goes to $30, you've got to buy it...

But here's my problem...

Why buy it at all, if it's going to be this nutty?... It doesn't seem to matter to the sellers what price they sell, so I should just wait until they're done selling...

But, on the other hand, how do I know when they're done selling? You see, that's the fundamental conundrum... I call it a buyer's dilemma...

Most managers are using the same playbook and, right now, it's saying sell the commodities, okay... sell commodities... and sell the stocks... and buy the companies that benefit from cheaper oil... I've been saying it on this show.

Now, who wants to buy a FWLT* that's been cut in half, and is really dirt cheap, right... I mean, we know $10 in cash, no debt, big orders... when the companies that benefit from cheap oil have been on fire lately? Why not buy commodity users like Kimberly-Clark (KMB) or FedEx (FDX)?... Hey, FDX pre-announced sharply better-than-expected earnings because fuel has fallen and that was up $3 today... Ain't that better than a sharp stick in the eye, or owning Foster Wheeler (FWLT*)?...

But what it makes even harder is the velocity... the velocity, or the speed, with which the money is pouring out makes it really difficult...

Yesterday, we saw huge companies in this companies in this space just get polaxxed, spindled, mutilated, losing mammoth chunks of their capitalization. We saw seller after seller after seller knock these stocks down, but what we did not see - the mirage you cannot allow yourself to be seduced into believing - is the overall capitulation, even with the rally today that took back some, but not all, of the losses...

See, with real capitulation... in other words, for these stocks to be completely and utterly washed out... all of the momentum hedge fund shareholders out, right... well, that's what you need to see... real capitulation. That hasn't happened yet.

Now, yesterday, we had a disorganized rabble of sellers coming from every direction, because they're all using the same playbook... In my experience, with a plethora of sellers, no brokerage house is fast enough to find a buyer that can stabilize things, let alone with an appetite for so much stock at a given level. And, remember, the sellers of these stocks are so big that there's no way they can get out anywhere near the last price. When you have seven or eight guys each trying to sell 2 million shares of the same stock at the same time, the brokers can't handle the volume. So, instead of capitulation, what we get is this continuous, continuous hideous selling, with breaks like today...

But why don't these guys think... like, if you and I were selling, we'd say, listen, this is too cheap, right... Why don't these guys that are selling commodity stocks, knocking them down 5, 6, or 7 points... why don't they just walk away, right... stop unloading... Aren't these prices too cheap? Shouldn't they just wait for higher prices that would be caused simply by them walking away?... No. You see, a lot of them don't have a choice. They're facing redemptions from unhappy investors who want their money back... They have to liquidate. Unfortunately, far too many hedge funds that own big positions in commodities have gone under, or are going under right now. They can't wait for the stocks to go up $5. They're the ones... they need the cash!

Sure, we could get a trading bottom like we had yesterday... it turned out to be one, right... but the only investable bottoms.. where you can walk away for a couple of days... will happen when a true hedge fund selling climax occurs... either because the return of the Chinese... These are some other things you get... a hedge fund selling climax, where they're all done... or you get a return of the Chinese demand, perhaps after the ParaOlympics... or you get an Exxon Mobil (XOM) or an Arcelor Mittal (MT), or a BHP Billiton (BHP), actually taking over a natural gas company, or a steel company, or a mineral company, respectively... because they're taking a longer-term view... something no one is taking on Wall Street... and, if you try to take one, you'll get annihilated bad...

The actual fundamentals? They haven't mattered at all, not for the last 30 points...