By Chris Tyler, Optionetics.com Published: July 20, 2007 11:30 AM EST MARKET ANALYSIS A bit more leftover financial fireworks and a major benchmark finally tagged have the bulls cheering. Entering Friday’s session, though, a “GOOG” week has turned slightly defensive, spearheaded by a couple of heavyweight slimming down on disappointing earnings. For the three-day period, the S&P500 ($SPX) and NASDAQ ($COMPQ) are up .23% to .84% on expiration-related levels of profit taking, snapping up shares and everything in between. Once more July has continued to be a good one for the bulls. Although and yet again, it hasn’t been a straight line in delivering its record-breaking gains in many of our most notorious market barometers. For the bulls, leadership from the semiconductor (SMH) sector, courtesy of Novellus’ (NVLS) better-than-feared results have aided their efforts. All-time-highs and percentage gains of 1.85% to 3.15% in the ever-strong energy complex (XLE, OIH) has also helped secure “Dow 14!” headlines as of Thursday’s close. IBM’s (IBM) well-received earnings beat did its part as well as fresh five-year highs and price-weighted gains of 5.65% are certainly of importance to the fore mentioned benchmark. And of course, typical bullish biases which also seems to reawaken during expiration week might be considered as decent fuel for getting investors Not helping the bulls, but thus far being outmanned by the factors above, financial (XLF, IAI) shares continue to lag badly. More woes on the subprime front courtesy of Bernanke’s monetary address, a “nearly worthless” announcement by Bear (BSC), related downgrades (JPM, GS, MS, LEH), higher loan-loss provisions and more disappointing reports on housing have continued to make the market’s most heavily-weighted sector one of its leading laggards. Entering Friday’s session, oil prices hovering near $76-a-barrel and about 2% from its all-time contract highs, has yet to make a negative impact on Wall Street. Incidentally, neither has Google (GOOG), at least as far as CNBC seems to be concerned. Last night the internet behemoth missed earnings, which sent shares tumbling by more than 6%. Put another way and even more psychologically hard-to-handle, 40 points were shaved off its still very, very large market heft. Somewhat interesting, the bulls at CNBC have opted to apparently remove that bit of nastiness from today’s pre-game show, the details of which can be found later this morning in the Market Beat.