I spend most Mondays wading through hundreds of tables and charts, reams of tables and charts, perhaps even acres of tables and charts, searching for the perfect play for WOW readers.

This is my fate as the team's senior analyst and “strategery” guy. Why so many? Because you have to be rather careful with these things.

If charts are based on facts and reasonably well drawn, then their results should be accurate enough. That doesn't mean that they will automatically convey wisdom.

For example, if you only examined the S&P Select Financial SPDR Fund (XLF:AMEX) as whole, you might think that the entire banking sector's future was perfectly secure. Appearances, however, can be deceiving.

The XLB certainly appears robust. This index has been driving upward both over the long term -- gaining 103% since late 2002 -- and mid-term, where 12 of the past 30 weeks saw new 52-week highs.

But the group of stocks that make up this ETF is hardly as uniform as the name suggests. In fact, if you bust open the bundle you will find two entirely different kinds of companies influencing the XLB's readout.

On the one hand, you have the “rock star” investment banks like JP Morgan Chase (JPM:NYSE), Goldman Sachs (GS:NYSE) and Morgan Stanley (MS:NYSE) representing some 12% by weight.

The individual charts for these three are still rather strong. (It is probably no coincidence that execs with these names on their bonus checks own the choicest residential real estate in downtown Manhattan.)

However, the XLF's two top-ranked players (comprising 17.56% of the XLB between them) are Citigroup (C:NYSE) and Bank of America (BAC:NYSE). And both of these 800lb gorillas are looking for a place to lie down and nap a bit.

Citigroup's sequence of new sequential highs failed at its blow-off top during the last week of December, 2006, and may very well return to $50/share (a loss of 12%), while Bank of America's negative Money Flow should ensure that it moves no higher than $54, and may very well also drop to below $50 over the next six weeks.