MarketWatch looks at bulls, bears and a bottom in gold and bonds

After the market gyrations of the past few weeks, what does MarketWatch have to say?

Peter Brimelow in "Veteran bulls and bears nurse wounds":

Don Hays of Hays Advisory...wrote on Wednesday...: "...a significant bottom is being forged, probably the low of the year for the S&P 500..."

Dan Sullivan of The Chartist...said on Wednesday...: "...still more downside appears to be in the cards before the selling pressure lifts... Nevertheless... thus far, the correction appears to be a normal pullback within the confines of an ongoing bull market."

A veteran bear, Michael Burke of Investors Intelligence, recently complained that "we have not seen a big number of selling climaxes. That is something we look for at bottoms."...

Another veteran bear, Richard Russell of Dow Theory Letters last night repeated his long-held view that the final phase of the bull market is still to come and that gold shares and bullion are in an uptrend...

Walter Rouleau in Growth Fund Guide and Joe Granville in the Granville Market Letter are talking...about a retreat to somewhere around Dow 7000.

Charles Allmon of Growth Stock Outlook has been 80 percent in cash forever... [I]n his latest issue [he] offers this cheerful thought: "Deflation, anyone? If the import bubble implodes simultaneously with the real estate bubble, guess how those banks will fare that were financing risky home loans right up to the final day of reckoning."

Mark Hulbert in "Bottom for both gold and bonds?":

An extraordinary thing happened earlier this month among the gold and bond market timing newsletters monitored by the Hulbert Financial Digest. The average adviser in both camps became extremely bearish. On the contrarian grounds that the markets rarely accommodate the majority, this should be bullish for both gold and bonds...

The most straightforward interpretation, it seems to me, is that a crisis is imminent in which the viability of the financial markets is called into question -- one in which there is a flight to quality (such as government bonds) as well to hard assets (such as gold).

And guess where that leaves equities?