Brace yourself, kids

Here we wanted to believe that GM's strong earnings, benign inflation numbers and better-than-expected consumer confidence would get the Dow back up to the 14,000 mark. But along comes another one of those little-known mortgage lenders that suddenly faces big-time liquidity problems because of margin calls. The Dow takes an about face and falls 146 points. But wait it gets worse, according to the Stock Trader's Almanac (courtesy of MarketBeat). For 13 of the last 20 years, stocks have been down on the first trading day of August (that's tomorrow). Actually, July is usually the best month of the quarter. But here's the scariest nugget: in four of the past five times when June and July were losers, stocks fell hard in the second half of the year. But hey, who believes that stuff anyway?