It's just like CBO reporting: only relevant when the thugs can make it appear to support their ideology.

Let me take a shot here and I'm speaking in generalities. Health industry stocks are usually seen as defensive stocks. When the market is in decline, go for health industry stocks because people will always need the health industry. When the market is booming, go with riskier ventures that will pay off better.

This past Friday was a good market day, especially on the Nasdaq. So, people jumped to where the money was heading and away from the health industry.

I saw internet posts (including here) about Scarborough and health stocks. Then people started pointing out how health stocks jumped since HCR talks began. The DOW and S&P500 are both up ~25.5% over the last 6 months. And guess what, so are health stocks. Health may have a few points on the average. It's not a big shocker and I highly doubt HCR had much to do with the insurance stock.

Since the bill hasn't been finalized, the health industry doesn't know exactly what it is or isn't getting yet. So Wall Street doesn't know which pony to back yet. Wall Street and individual investors and placing small hedged bets right now on who the winners will be. In all actuality, drug companies didn't see much bounce when Bush signed the Medicare drug plan in December 2008.

It's common for stocks to bounce a bit on big news days, but the stocks usually settle in a day or two or a week. Big breakthroughs are what make stocks jumps stick. Legislation, not so much. You have to watch when the companies start getting large lump sums of gov't money.

Still, it's pretty funny considering the meme that Joe Scarborough jumped on a few days ago, and then Jane Hamsher's firebreather, um, I mean firedoglake wrote another ankle bitting piece on this too. Actually, I saw it on several other blogs too and they jumped on it as well. Too funny.

Sort of reminds me of the Obama Bear Market mime.

Can't wait until people mark the passage of the healthcare bill as good for Republicans.

... and then Jane Hamsher's firebreather, um, I mean firedoglake wrote another ankle bitting piece on this too.

FAILdoglake.

I think if any other notable netroots lefty joins Hamsher and Norquist, that completes the seventh circle of spin.

QUICK!!! Someone tweet Joe Scarborough!!!

And!............ Stocks can and will screw you!

Not always, but it's little better than gambling.

Not quite as reckless as marriage however ;^)

Adding: my dad was a broker!

Adding more: it's actually worse than that, he was the head of a brokerage firm!

Elvis or Redmond could have fun with that.

They went down because it was an episode of the price being what's called "already baked in." Meaning that over the last few weeks/months, everyone with half a brain knew that the insurance co's would come out on top, which is why you saw them reach 52 week highs recently, and with the passage of the bill, there are shall we say less sophisticated investors out there, who - despite these stocks being at their peaks - thought it would be a good time to buy, what with this watered down-piece-of-shit-gift-to-the-industry bill being passed in the senate, and so the one's who had the foresight to buy the stocks now had some suckers to sell them to. It's referred to as "sell the news." Like when a drug company is awaiting approval of a drug, and it's stock has run up in anticipation of FDA approval, and then when it actually gets approved, the stock, inexplicably, goes down upon the announcement.

Wall St. is a cruel, cruel place.

I meant "its" stock. Not "it's."

I hate when I make that mistake (although it is a common one.)

Well, since we're all in the confessional, both my sister and I have worked at several of the brokerage firms including Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and American Express. We too whored ourselves for big corporations at one time. Ugh!

Damn rox we're both descended from or somehow related to wall-street whores!

How did we end up being liberals?

Maybe we have a true sense of social justice!