picking top tuesday

Mary Anne Bartels is calling for a top and correction on Wall Street. First of many top pickers in the coming days I assume. I don't really agree with it, but it's always nice to get a wide range of views.

Well here it goes.

Using the 1974-1975 period as a guide, the S&P 500 <.SPX> probably reached

a top this month ahead of a correction into January, says Mary Ann Bartels,

head of U.S. technical analysis at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch.

"From Oct. 3 1974 to July 15 1975 the S&P 500 rallied 53.52 percent before

correcting 14.14 percent into Sept. 16, 1975," she said in a note on Monday.

"Overlaying this on the current rally off the March low suggests a mid- to

late-November top ahead of a correction into January 2010."

The S&P 500 is up 61.1 percent from its 12-year closing low of March 9,

2009. Bartels pegged near-term resistance for the S&P 500 at 1,080-1,100,

short-term support at 1,084-1,080. Subsequent to that, she saw support at

1,074, a level that would also represent the index's 50-day moving average, a

key technical measure of market's trend.

In Monday's afternoon trading, the S&P 500 was off 1.87 points, or 0.17

percent, to 1,089.62.

Reuters Messaging rm://[email protected]