Just about every company that beat expectations recently did it by cutting costs and increasing margins. It may boost share price now, but it could create problems down the road.

On Wednesday, leading stocks started to sell off, but you wouldn’t know it from the action in the indexes. The selling continued Thursday, and it hit the indexes as well. And then on Friday, the indexes were up (led by financial and energy stocks) while leading stocks were down again. It was pretty much a carbon copy of Wednesday — while the indexes were up, the big money was selling the leaders.