Despite yesterday's closing rally, the overall chart pattern remains unchanged, with all of our most-watched internal indicators overbought and most of the sentiment indicators showing more complacency with the public now becoming very bullish.

So with the market's internals now at their weakest, the bulls are attempting an attack on the most formidable overhead of the entire bear market.

For 25 years, Steven Halpern, editor of TheStockAdvisors.com, has surveyed the leading financial newsletter advisors asking for their favorite stocks for the coming year. This article is one of 100+ ideas in the Best Stocks for 2008 report.

"For the investor who has some money with which he or she is willing to take some risk, I suggest they take a look at the regional banks ETF iShares Dow Jones US Regional Banks (NYSE: IAT), which I've selected as my top speculative pick for 2008," notes Leonard Goodall, CFA and editor of No-Load Portfolios.

"I recommend this ETF for two reasons, a fundamental reason and a timeliness reason. From a fundamental perspective, most of the regional banks in this portfolio have good solid financials and they know their areas of service well enough to avoid the worst aspects of the current real estate crisis.

"The three largest holdings in the fund -- US Bancorp, Suntrust Bank and PNC Financial -- all have records of consistently improving earnings over the last five years. US Bancorp and Suntrust have raised their dividends each of the last five years, and PNC has raised its dividend in three of the five.

"Purchase of the fund now is timely because its price has been pushed down along with all financial stocks that have been the victim of the subprime mortgage crisis.

I had a chance today to take one of the online Implicit Association Tests (IAT) of Project Implicit, an ongoing study by Harvard-affiliated academics trying to uncover the associations, often subconscious, that guide our perceptions. The test I took was one of gender, and it told me that I am biased toward associating careers with men, family life with women. I admit, I am a product of 1950s television, so the results weren't surprising.

It did cause me, however, to wonder what assumptions we make in considering our portfolio. See if any of these hit the mark –

• Big companies = bad companies. For us children of the '60s, this message was drilled into us during the protests of companies engaged in weapons research during the Vietnam War. Later, movies such as The China Syndrome and Alien 2 mined the same vein.
• Female CEO = Chummy, non-confrontational office atmosphere. The ghost of Mary Richards, Laverne and Shirley, or Monica, Rachael and Phoebe haunt many of us.
• Chinese profits = American losses. We faced this in the 1980s with Japan, and Korea. Perhaps this is a holdover from the depression, when so many people believed in the zero sum game; the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. Even though this has been disproven over and over, it seems to be part of the American psyche. It could also be expressed as Mexican immigrants = loss of American jobs, although I don't see any of my friends lining up to mow lawns.
• The majority is always right. You would think such an irrational corollary to the democratic model would find no traction, but there most be a reason for the dot-com bubble.

Take a few minutes, if you wish, to take one of the Project Implicit tests. See if it doesn't cause you to wonder about the implicit assumptions that color your judgment. And what do you think are some other assumptions people hold about the stock market that I didn't mention?