The market is slightly higher in early trading. For the first morning in awhile, there were no headlines out of Greece about progress or delays in its debt settlement talks.

Asian markets were higher overnight, led by China after the govt. raised gasoline prices and also provided support to the real estate market by instructing lenders to accommodate first time homebuyers.

With US Equity Indexes challenging and breaking to new recovery highs, it can be helpful to take a moment to raise your perspective to the monthly chart frame.

Let’s take a quick look at the monthly index charts, starting with the S&P 500:

The S&P 500 lags the Dow and NASDAQ at the moment, as it has not yet broken officially to new recovery highs beyond the May 2011 peak (1,370).

The market ended off the highs of the session, but with volume coming in lower we avoid a day of stalling. Russell 2000 small cap index raced higher tying the NASDAQ composite for the top index of the day. Interestingly, enough both indexes have yet to have the golden cross yet continue to lead the entire market higher. Bernanke’s testimony on the hill helped spark some buying, but as the testimony wore on sellers began to take over. We continue to play in overbought conditions, but this rally is healthy and remains that way. Tomorrow’s job report will certainly set off fireworks.

When a mutual fund or hedge fund lists their historical returns, the industry standard is to use time-weighted returns that assume you buy at the beginning of the time period and hold until the end. However, what often happens is that a fund will start out small and have great returns for a while, gradually start attracting lots of investor money, and then the subsequent returns are not so hot. Whatever special inefficiency or investment idea the fund managers had initially is either wiped out by market forces over time or simply hindered by asset bloat.

The market gapped higher for its third consecutive Tuesday of 2012, which again helped to make the difference on the week for the indexes.  The remainder of the time was marked by a considerable amount of choppy, trendless action, serving as another reminder of the importance of trade selection in this low-volatility environment.

For the week, I took a number of entries as both day trades and swing trades, and it was a really nice week. Both timeframes provided profits, which is a big advantage of having capital at work across multiple timeframes.