How's the market treating you these days? After a punishing January and a brutal February, March has come as a refreshingly bullish surprise. As long as you're not an AIG retention bonus recipient -- or banked your entire March Madness bracket on Siena having a Cinderella season to the end -- you're probably sitting pretty if you've been long the market this month.

Yes, even Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are acceptable again in public places.

It's important, though, to never feel too comfortable with the market momentum. When the Dow cracked well below 7,000 earlier this month -- and pundits were pointing to 5,000 as the next milestone to give way -- I stepped up as a contrarian.

I'm certainly glad to see that my optimism won out, but now that everyone's cheery and pointing to higher Dow milestones, I'm not so comfortable in the crowd. I'll stick to my optimism, but I'm a little happier when the rest of my fellow investors aren't smiling along with me.

Briefly in the news
And now let's take a quick look at some of the other stories that shaped our week.

  • New Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz continues to clean house. She pulled the plug on the company's FareChase travel shopping comparison engine on Wednesday. The company has even tested out 141 different versions of its homepage, trying to find one that makes Yahoo! stickier. One thing you can definitely say about Bartz is that she's not just mailing it in and handing the company over to a hungry Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).
  • A Goldman Sachs analyst downgraded shares of Disney (NYSE:DIS), arguing that the family entertainment giant wasn't justified in trading at multiples that are 25% higher than its media rivals. Disney isn't worth a premium? Tell that to the people paying $70 to get into one of its Florida theme parks this year!
  • Home prices keep dropping, yet homebuilder stocks are bouncing back? How do cheaper existing homes make developing on a suburban lot any more compelling?
  • DirecTV (NYSE:DTV) had to pay up to renew its deal with the NFL. I'm guessing that DISH Network (NASDAQ:DISH) -- the rival that's shedding subscribers -- probably made a hard play for that, driving up the final bid. I guess it's good to be Sirius XM Radio (NASDAQ:SIRI) now, knowing that it won't have to bid against itself to renew its satellite radio contract with the football league.

Until next week, I remain,
Rick Munarriz