Article: Rallied out or ready to roll again? Bull market or bear market rally, stocks will have a hard time matching the strong 2003 pace and may drift sideways. But it is an election year, so policies favor the upside, and China's a growing factor.(Markets)

If the job of a market is to confuse traders and keep as many as possible from participating in a price move, then the stock market has done a pretty good job in the last year.

A year ago, heading into the attack on Iraq, uncertainty was the major theme (see "Stocks at war," March 2003). Not many analysts were thinking in terms of a bull market like the 43% advance in the S&P 500 index--and much bigger gains than that in other major indexes (see "Running of the bulls," right)--that unfolded from the March 2003 low tot he close at the end of January 2004 (although analyst John Rawlins' cycle program did project a major low in the Dow Jones Industrial Average near ...

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